CONTRIBUTORS

Hasti Abbasi holds a BA and an MA in English Literature. She is a sessional academic and a PhD. scholar of literary studies and creative writing at Griffith University.

David Adès returned to Australia in 2016 after living for five years in Pittsburgh. He is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and short story writer and the author of Mapping the World (Wakefield Press / Friendly Street Poets, 2008), the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal (Garron Publishing, 2015) and the forthcoming Afloat in Light (UWA Publishing, 2017). David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize (2005). Mapping the World was commended for the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award 2008. David has been a member of Friendly Street Poets since 1979. He is a former Convenor of Friendly Street Poets and co-edited the Friendly Street Poetry Reader 26. He was also one of a volunteer team of editors of the inaugural Australian Poetry Members Anthology Metabolism published in 2012. His poetry has been published in numerous journals in Australia and the U.S. with publications also in Israel, Romania and New Zealand.
David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. He is one of 9 poets featured on a CD titled Adelaide 9. In 2014 David won the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems were also Highly Commended in the 2016 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize 2016.

Paul Adkin is an Australian writer (from Melbourne) and dramatist living in Spain. He graduated in Drama and English from Rusden in 1979. In the 1980s he produced plays on the Melbourne fringe circuit: at La Mama and the now long-gone Pram Factory and Anthill theatres, and he was the artist-in-residence at Anthill in 1983. Now he runs his own theatre company in Madrid and usually produces his own plays. He also writes in Spanish. He’s had several stories published in the Spanish media and he won a short story prize with the European, a weekly pan-European newspaper that has since disappeared. He also writes longer stories and novels. His novel Purgatory (Part one of the Terra Australis Incognita) is a published Indie e-book and can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Paul-David-Adkin/e/B0082UK618 with at least one of his plays, Hamlet Rexhttps://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Rex-ebook/dp/B008E8WJ4U . He also dabbles in philosophy, which sometimes seeps out on his blog: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com.

Graham Akhurst studied for a Bachelor of Creative Arts in writing at the University of Queensland and is currently doing his honours. Prior to this he completed an Advanced Diploma of Performing Arts from the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts where he studied music, and wrote and co-created several performances that were held at QPAC. Graham has been published several times for fiction and poetry. Graham is of Aboriginal descent and hails from the Kokomini tribe in Northern Queensland. He resides in Brisbane.

Jamie Alcock is from North Wales and lives and works in Devon, UK. He divides his time between writing and working as an outdoor educator with vulnerable young people and adults. He holds a MA in creative writing (dist.) from Bangor University, where he is currently studying for a PhD in creative writing. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize, has poetry currently in The Seventh Quarry, a novel extract in The Manchester Review, and a short story forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle.

Lucy Alexander is a Canberra poet who has published two books of poems (Fathomsin 1997 and Feathered Tongues in 2004). She is a sessional academic at the University of Canberra and also a mother to four kids. She writes a regular poem on poemation@wordpress.com and also reviews for Verity La. Recently she was runner up in PoetryInAction and a finalist in HardCopy 2014 for her manuscript of fiction,Quarantine.

Jordie Albiston has published nine poetry collections and a handbook on poetic form. Albiston possesses an ongoing pre-occupation with mathematical constructs and constraints, and the possibilities offered in terms of poetic structure. Her work has won many awards, including the Mary Gilmore Award and the 2010 NSW Premier’s Prize. She lives in Melbourne.

Alice Allan’s poetry has appeared in Cordite, Rabbit, Plumwood Mountain and Australian Book Review. You can find more of her writing at aliceallan.net.

Elizabeth Allen has had her poems published in many major literary journals, as well as in the Best Australian Poems 2012. Her chapbook, Forgetful Hands, was published by Vagabond Press in 2005 and her first collection, Body Language, was released in 2012 and won the Anne Elder Award.Richard James Allen’s ten books of poetry, fiction and performance texts include Fixing the Broken Nightingale(Flying Island Books), The Kamikaze Mind(Brandl & Schlesinger) and Thursday’s Fictions (Five Islands Press), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. He won the Chancellor’s Award for most outstanding PhD thesis at UTS. Widely published in anthologies, journals and online for over thirty years, Allen has been the recipient of numerous awards, nominations, grants, as well as opportunities for presentations, screenings and broadcasts, in a unique international career as an acclaimed writer, director, choreographer and performer. Further information: https://ww.physicaltv.com.au & https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/allen-richard-james.

Miles Allinson is an artist of word, film and image. Mundane biographical details may follow in the near future. Until then you might want to see more of his art or read his words at his blog A Confrontation with Falling.

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). A recipient of writing residencies from MacDowell Colony (USA), Hawthornden Castle (UK) and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), her poetry is publishing in journals and anthologies in many countries and online. www.ivyalvarez.com

Jim Anderson was born in Suffolk, England, but his family immigrated to Australia when he was one year old. In Sydney he studied law at the University of Sydney while also working as a public servant at the Attorney General’s Department. Jim joined Oz in 1969. In 1971 he was prosecuted in London, along with fellow Oz editors Felix Dennis and Richard Neville for Oz number 28, the infamous ‘Schoolkids Issue’. They were charged with Conspiracy to Corrupt Public Morals, an offence which carried life imprisonment. International human rights jurist Geoff Robertson and the late John Mortimer were part of the defence team. This was a political trial, designed to snuff out Oz for good, and to permanently damage the Underground Press generally. They beat the Conspiracy charge, which was a triumph, but went down on the lesser charge of publishing obscene material. Jim and his co-editors were imprisoned but six months later, on appeal, they were vindicated by the High Court and permitted to start re-publishing the magazine. Jim declared his homosexuality to his mother after the Oz trial, but never told his father. Jim had a mental breakdown and travelled to Ghana in Africa and then to California in the United States to find treatment and relief. He spent some time in Druid Heights, a healing centre in Marin County, and then moved to Bolenos, a small town north of San Francisco where he lived for 18 years. Jim’s book, Billarooby, was published in 1988. Told from the view of a 12-year-old boy, it explored themes of relationships of the boy with his father and a male teacher who falls in love with his father. He also edited Richard Neville’s 1995 memoir Hippy, Hippy Shake. Jim returned to Sydney in the mid-1990s and had an art exhibition, ‘Lampoon: An Historical Art Trajectory’ at the Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, February 18 – March 12 2011, which was remounted at South Hill Gallery, Goulburn.

Eunice Andrada is a Filipino-Australian poet, journalist and teaching artist based in Sydney. Her poems have been featured in Peril, Voiceworks, and Deep Water Literary Review, among others. Featured in the Guardian, CNN and other media, her poetry has also been performed in diverse international stages, from the Sydney Opera House to the UN Climate Negotiations in Paris. She was awarded the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Poetry Prize in 2014. In 2016, she was honoured by Australian Poetry as the first of their 30 Under 30 Poets. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming.

Merrindahl Andrew is a semi-submerged poet and short story writer living in Canberra. She is usually adorned with small children. Her work has appeared in Cordite, Islet, Block, Muse and Muse Apprentice Guild.

Karen Andrews is an award-winning short story writer and poet, children’s book author, blogger, and publisher at Miscellaneous Press.

Louis Armand is the author of eight novels, including The Combinations (2016), Cairo (2014), and Breakfast at Midnight (2012). In addition, he has published ten collections of poetry – most recently, East Broadway Rundown (2015) & The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015) – & is the author of Videology (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013). He lives in Prague.

Daniel Armstrong is a photo-media, installation artist and tertiary lecturer. His current research explores relationships between photography and astronomy with a specific interest in how scientific imaging both falters and succeeds at the edge of representation and relationships of the body to space and visualisation of the cosmos. He is also interested in the historical relationships between photography and astronomy, the lens and the telescope and the cultural and philosophical implications of these relationships. Other research interests include the illuminated image, suburbia and contemporary culture, the architectural, sound and video and sensor-triggered installation art. He exhibits and present conference papers on a regular basis. In June and July 2009 he undertook an Australia Council residency at a number Astronomical Observatories in the USA. He lives in the rural Victoria where he spends his nights imaging the dark skies with homemade and primitive cameras and telescopes. He is currently undertaking a fine art PhD at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University in Melbourne.

Cassandra Atherton is a Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University. She has published a book of literary criticism, Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair: A Study of Gwen Harwood’s Pseudonymous Poetry (Australian Scholarly Press, 2007), a book of poetry, After Lolita (Ahadada Press, 2010), and a novel, The Man Jar (Printed Matter Press, 2010).

Susan Austin is a 34-year-old poet, mental health occupational therapist and eco- socialist activist. She grew up in Qld and now lives in Hobart. Her first poetry manuscript ‘An Undertow of Resilience’ was awarded First Commended in the Best First Book category of the IP Picks 2011 competition and has been published, with the title Undertow, by Walleah Press in September 2012. She has had poems published in the magazines Semper, Heretical, Famous Reporter, Blue Giraffe, Poetrix and Poetry Matters; in the newspapers Fraser Coast Chronicle, Green Left Weekly and The Tasmanian Times; in a Tasmanian young writer’s initiative The Brew; in a TAFE anthology Poems from the Dig, in a Fellowship of Writers Tasmanian anthology Net of Hands and in the Poets’ Republic. Susan has been a featured poet at the Republic Readings, a Poetry and Politics event, a Tasmanian Living Writers Week event and the Net of Hands launch. Susan was the Tasmanian guest poet at the 2011 Tasmanian Poetry Festival. Susan was commended in the FAW Norma and Colin Knight Poetry Award 2007 and won equal first prize in the Terri and Hal Moore Poetry Award 2007. She won second prize and a commendation in the FAW Norma and Colin Knight Poetry Award 2009. Susan judged the 2012 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Eve Masterman Peace Poetry prize.

Chelsea Avard is a writer from Adelaide. She is co-editor of the 2005 anthology The Body, and co-organiser of the Wordfire salon. She teaches English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide, where she completed her PhD. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in anthologies by Sleepers Publishing and Wakefield Press. You can find her creative non-fiction and other short works at https://chelseaavard.wordpress.com/

Leigh Backhouse is an exhibiting artist. His photographs first appeared in the group show Special Issue, First Floor Gallery, 1998; since then he’s produced three solo shows—Remote, Colour Factory Gallery, 2011; The Other World, Kick Gallery, 2010; Deadline at Dawn, Kick Gallery, 2006—and participated in numerous group shows including Contemporary Landscapes, Colour Factory Gallery, 2011, Art Melbourne – Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, 2010, and Northern Exposure, Kick Gallery, 2009 (all Melbourne). In 2012, Leigh was a finalist for the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre’s Photographic Award; in 2009, ‘untitled 2006’ was named Winner, Animal Image, Kodak Salon, Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP).

Sunil Badami has written for publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, The Australian, The Australian Literary Review, Southerly, Seizure and Meanjin. His work has been published in Australia and overseas, including in Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Essays. He is writing his first novel.

Magdalena Ball was born in New York City and now lives in Lake Macquarie, NSW. She runs The Compulsive Reader review site and is the author of the novels Black Cowand Sleep Before Evening, a book of poetry, Repulsion Thrust, and a number of other chapbooks, collaborative works and nonfiction. Her poems and stories have been shortlisted for several awards including, locally, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Grieve Writing Competition, and the Bayside Poetry Prize, and her work has been widely published in local and international literary journals. Find out more about Magdalena at www.magdalenaball.com.

Jeremy Balius was born in Dallas, Texas, raised in Gießen, Germany, educated in Los Angeles, California, and now resides in Perth, Western Australia. He looks after Black Rider Press and hangs out with the Cottonmouth kids. He writes for the last of the red hot lovers.

Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems ( Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as “not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them.” Creator of The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. https://www.charlesbanejr.com

Emily Barber recently completed a PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne, where she works as a tutor and supervisor. Her thesis, an extract of which has appeared in Hecate, explored female desire and agency in selected stories by Lorrie Moore. Emily is currently writing a collection of short stories.

StuartBarnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University, Victoria. His first poetry collection Glasshouses (UQP, 2016) won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 FAW Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the 2017 ASAL Mary Gilmore Award. Stuart‘s learning Catalan and translating Imma Tubella’s Un secret de l’Empordà into English. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.

John Bartlett’s non-fiction and essays have been widely published and will be collated into an e-book entitled A Tiny and Brilliant Light to be released in November 2017. He is also the author of two novels, Towards a Distant Sea and Estuary and a collection of short stories, All Mortal Flesh. He blogs regularly at beyondtheestuary.com.

Richard Bell is a freelance poet who has been published 19 times over the internet and 14 times in print media. Richard finds that he is inspired by things he experiences and writes auto-biographical contemporary free-verse poetry.

S. Van Berkel: ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.’- John Lennon. Conspiracy theorists would say this line is a confession that Paul McCartney is dead. S. Van Berkel likes to see it as a devaluing of the individual ego. In line with this she doesn’t have much to say here, except that if you like her writing you can see more at Grotesque Gleams. As for the conspiracy theory, she couldn’t care less. Paul McCartney or no Paul McCartney, ‘I Am the Walrus’ is a damn good song.

Fleur Beaupert is a Melbourne based poet. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in spaces such as aaduna, 404 Ink, Blue Pepper, Bimblebox 153 Birds, Regime and Cordite Poetry Review.

Craig Billingham’s poems, stories and reviews have appeared widely, including in Meanjin,Australian Book Review, Southerly, and Review of Australian Fiction. A collection of poems,Storytelling, was published in 2007. He is a Doctor of Arts candidate at the University of Sydney.

Annie Blake is an Australian writer who has poetry forthcoming in GFT Press and Southerly. She has also been published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal,About Place Journal, Australian Poetry Journal,Cordite Poetry Review and more. Her poem ‘These Grey Streets’ has been nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize by Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She is excited about the process of individuation, research in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cosmology. She is a former teacher who lives in Melbourne with her husband and five kids. You can visit her on Facebook,Pinterest, Goodreads and on her blog.

Neil Boyack was born in 1967, and adopted six-months later. He was married in Las Vegas in 1997 and has kids. He lives with his family on solar power in the Victorian bush and gets money from social work. His stories have been translated into French and Chinese. Previous short story collections are Black, Snakeskin-Vanilla, See through and the acclaimed collection from 2003 Transactions. Neil is the director and creator of the Newstead Short Story Tattoo.

Nicholas Brooks is a creative writing student but asks that you don’t hold this against him. Think of him instead as an underdog, a lover, and your mate, Seabird. You can check out his pitiful attempts at self-promotion at readingroomofhell.wordpress.com

Kevin Brophy teaches creative writing in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. From 1980 to 1994 he was founding co-editor of the national literary journal, Going Down Swinging. In 2005 he was awarded the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry. In 2009 he was co-winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay.

Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields in Sydney. He now teaches at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. Lachlan’s first book of poetry, Limited Cities, was published by Giramondo in 2012. His poems have appeared in journals like Southerly, Mascara, Rabbit and Etchings.

Emily Brugman writes and surfs around Byron Bay. She is currently completing her honours year in creative writing, while working at the public library. Her words have been published in Tracks Magazine,UTS Writers’ Anthologies 2013 and 2014, and Tincture Journal. This is her first published poem. You can find out more about Emily on her blog.

Shannon Burns is an Adelaide-based writer, reviewer/critic and sometimes-academic. He has written for Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Music & Literature. He is a current ABR Patrons Fellow and a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He won the 2009 Adelaide Review Prize for Short Fiction and has published short fiction in various places, including Wet Ink, Etchings, Mascara Literary Review and Overland. His long profile of Gerald Murnane appears in the August 2015 edition of the Australian Book Review.

Gabrielle Bryden is an Australian writer and poet published in Australian and international journals and books including Short and Twisted 2010, Mystic Signals; Ripples, Aspects, Speedpoets, and Extempore; the Cherry Blossom Review, Asphodel Madness, Sorcerous Signals, Lunarosity, Bolts of Silk, Third Eye, Specusphere, and Poetry2; and on local and national ABC Radio. She blogs poetry, stories and life here.

Elizabeth Bryer’s writing has previously appeared in HEAT, harvest and Kill Your Darlings and she blogs at Plume of Words.

Carmel Byrne is a Sydney native who usually spends most of her time in the studio working on slow-motion oil painting projects, but has recently taken to the camera until her major project, Scratch Art Space, is able to glide with it’s own momentum. Scratch began as artist’s studios and has now expanded to include an art gallery and a separate venture space where creative workshops and gatherings such as poetry events happen. No matter what medium Carmel chooses, the one thread that connects her oeuvre is an apparently benign content unsettled by a sinister tone. Carmel is well-traveled and has exhibited in Australia, Singapore, Bermuda and the USA. Find her at www.carmelbyrne.com; www.scratchartspace.com; and on twitter @ScratchArtSpace

Lauren Butterworth is an emerging writer with fiction and essays in Wet Ink, Libertine, Indaily and forthcoming in Crush: Stories About Love. She is co-host of the podcast, Deviant Women, and co-director of The Hearth, a creative readings event in Adelaide. She is also an academic advisor at Flinders University, where she completed her PhD in creative writing. You can find more of her writing at laurenbutterworth.com.Robyn Cadwallader is an editor and writer who lives in the country outside Canberra. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Australian journals including Wet Ink, Westerly and Famous Reporter, and her first collection of poetry, i painted unafraid, was published by Wakefield Press in 2010. Her short play, Artemisia, was performed at the Adelaide Fringe, in the Melbourne and Sydney (2012) Short + Sweet Festivals. In 2011 her short story, ‘The Day for Travelling’, won the Marjory Graber-McGinnis Short Story Award. She has taught medieval literature and creative writing at Flinders University and her academic study of a dragon-slaying virgin martyr was published by Mellen Press in 2008. Her novel, The Anchoress, was recently released Faber (UK) and HarperCollins (Aust), and will be released in May by Farrer, Straus & Giroux (USA) and Gallimard / Denoel (France). She blogs at Write in Pencil Only.Susie Campbell lives just outside London, England where she runs a small arts organisation (www.sumiartworking.net) with her partner as well as working full time in education. She writes and performs poetry, both short individual poems and more extended dramatic pieces of poetry. In 2009, she took her one-woman show ‘Emptymouthing’ to the Edinburgh Fringe festival. A 10-minute piece of her poetry forms the soundscape to an installation that is part of ‘Muerto de Amor’, an exhibition to celebrate the life and work of Federico Garcia Lorca currently showing in London. She runs her own local poetry night which provides a platform for both experienced and ‘new’ poets and performs regularly at poetry events around London.Dr Leslie Cannold is an author, commentator, ethicist and activist. Her books include the award-winning The Abortion Myth and What, No Baby? which made the Australian Financial Review’s top 101 books list. Her first novel, The Book of Rachael was published in 2011 by Text. Leslie is often noted as one of Australia’s leading thinkers. In 2005 she was listed alongside Professor Peter Singer, Professor Gustav Nossal and Inga Clendinnen as one of Australia’s top 20 public intellectuals. She was a finalist in the best science tweet contest for Science Week 2010. In 2011 she was made Australian Humanist of the Year.Ashley Capes teaches Media and English in Victoria. He moderates collaborative renku site Issa’s Snail and looks after kipple, a simple poetry blog. In addition to this he co-ordinates collaborative verse site The Poetry Slave and is leading the Zombie Renga at Cordite Poetry Review. His new poetry collection Stepping Over Seasons was released by Interactive Press in 2009 and most recently, his poetry has appeared in Red Leaves in both English and Japanese. Ashley very occasionally dabbles in film, has fronted a band and is addicted Studio Ghibli films. He is constantly awed by the simple beauty of haiku.

Dominic Christopher is a lawyer and writer from Sydney. His stories have appeared inGoing Down Swinging, Seizure, Scum Mag and the UTS Writers’ Anthology. He is currently shortlisted for the Newcastle Short Story Award.

Ben Carmichael, writer and student, beats out tunes on the cracked kettle of human language, but unlike Flaubert, has yet to get those bears dancing. Some of his ditties can be found in Voiceworks and LiMP, and more of his false notes and (dis)chords accumulate at Bootless Inquisitions, where they create a pleasing cacophony.Gayelene Carbis is an award-winning writer of poetry, prose and plays. She was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, Fish Poetry Prize (Ireland), work & tumble Chapbook Prize and recently, the Adrien Abbott, Martha Richardson and MPU Prizes. Gayelene was awarded a poetry scholarship to Banff in Canada and read poetry in Canada and New York. Her new one-woman show won Best Premiere Production in the US this year and will premiere in Melbourne in 2018. Gayelene has taught creative writing, Australian Indigenous studies and script writing at Melbourne University, Deakin University and RMIT. Gayelene’s first book of poetry, Anecdotal Evidence, was published by Five Islands Press in June 2017.Anne M Carson has been published in the USA, Ireland, France and widely in Australia. Her first collection, Removing the Kimono, was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2013. She has a particular interest in collaboration and has worked with a dancer, pianist, keyboard player and harpist. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize. As a Creative Writing Therapist she has edited three books. She teaches Poetry Writing and Appreciation to adults.Jo Case is associate editor of Kill Your Darlings and co-editor of The Big Issue Fiction Edition 2011. She is a former books editor of The Big Issue and deputy editor of Australian Book Review, and is a freelance writer and reviewer. She is currently working on her first book, which will be published by Hardie Grant.Libbie Chellew is a short fiction writer from Melbourne. Her stories appear in Antipodes, Going Down Swinging, The Literarian, Voiceworks and WetInk. She tweets as @libbiec.John Chavers enjoys working as a writer, artist, photographer, and general creator. Most recently, his writing and artwork have been accepted at The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library So It Goes 2016 Literary Journal, 3Elements Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Ascent, Birch Gang Review, Four Ties Lit Review, Ground Fresh Thursday, Silver Apples and The Ogham Stone, among others. John’s residency fellowships include Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He has a fascination for the diminutive, works of art on paper, and the desert. John lives in Austin, Texas.Changming Yuan, a nine-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven chapbooks, started to learn the English alphabet at age 19 and published monographs on translation before moving out of China. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 12, 14), BestNewPoemsOnline, LiNQ, Threepenny Review and 1209 other publications across 38 countries.Eileen Chong is a poet who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Her publications include Burning Rice(Australian Poetry, 2012), Peony(Pitt Street Poetry, 2014), Painting Red Orchids (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016), Another Language (George Braziller, 2017), The Uncommon Feast (Recent Work Press, 2018), and Rainforest (Pitt Street Poetry, forthcoming 2018). Her books have shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. www.eileenchong.com.au.Shane Jesse Christmass is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based writer. In 2006 he was runner-up in The Age Short Story Competition with his entry Remaking the Image of the World which the newspaper’s literary editor, Jason Steger, called a “highly inventive story, chocked with surrealistic allusion, nightmare imagery and psychological menace” … In 2008 Paroxysm Press published an anthology of his short stories called Croak & Grist … He’s also published a number of stories including ‘Shut Down the Pick Up’ (Waste, 2004, Paroxysm Press), ‘5’, (Shotgun, 2006, Paroxysm Press), ‘The Arvo & Early Evening of the Axe’,(10 Years that Didn’t Kill Us, 2008, Paroxysm Press), ‘The Charnel Stink Within’, (Mini Shots, 2008, Vignette Press) and “Cold to the Point Past Death”, (Red Cent Publishing, 2010) … His poetry has featured in the journals New Wave Vomit, amphibi.us, Cordite, one-eight vulture, dotdotdash and The Diamond & the Thief, as well as sound poetry in the Atlanta journal, As Long As It Takes. He’s just completed his first public reading of his screenplay, Orderly, at the inaugural Lion Pie Laboratory in Sydney. He edits the journal Queen Vic Knives.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887-1961 won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, 2010 and her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Indigenous writer (2010) and was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. In 2017, she received the Oodgeroo Noonucal Poetry Prize and the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize. Jeanine teaches Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne. The manuscript for her second volume of poetry, Walk Back Over was released in 2018 by Cordite Press.

John Clanchy has published five novels and four collections of stories. His stories have won major awards in Europe, US, NZ, and Australia (including the Queensland Premier’s Award for short fiction and, on two occasions, the ACT Book of the Year). His most recent collection is Six (Finlay Lloyd, 2014).Maxine Beneba Clarke is a West Indian-Australian writer & poetry slam champion. Her essays, fiction & short stories have been broadcast & published nationally, including in Voiceworks, the Age, the Big Issue, Overland, Kunapipi, Peril & Going Down Swinging, on 3CR radio’s Spoken Word and Hip Sista Hop and on RRR radio’s Aural Text and Max Headroom. Maxine’s second poetry collection Gil Scott Heron is on Parole was published by Picaro Press in 2010.Robbie Coburn was born in June 1994 in Melbourne and grew up in the rural district of Woodstock, Victoria. His poetry and criticism have been published in various Australian journals including Overland, Cordite and Going Down Swinging. He has published a collection, Rain Season, as well as several chapbooks and pamphlets. His latest chapbook is Mad Songs. His second collection of poetry The Other Flesh and a novel Conversation with Skin, are forthcoming. He is Poetry Editor for Verity La and currently resides in Melbourne.David Cohen is the author of the novel Fear of Tennis. His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Australian Book Review, The Big Issue Fiction Edition2012, Etchings, Meanjin, Southerly, and Wet Ink. He lives in Brisbane.Rijn Collins is an award winning Australian writer with over 100 short stories published in anthologies and journals, performed at literary festivals, and broadcast on Australian and American radio. She is a freelance writer for ABC Radio National, and won the inaugural Sarah Awards for Audio Fiction in New York in 2016. More of her work can be found on her website.Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her stage play, The Goose In The Bottle, has been shortlisted for the Lysicrates Prize in Sydney, and will be performed on February 10 with the other two shortlisted plays, whereupon the audience will vote for the winner. In effect, a play slam.P.S. Cottier is a poet, anthologist and writer who lives in Canberra. She wrote a PhD at ANU on animal imagery in the works of Charles Dickens. Her latest book is a pamphlet called Paths Into Inner Canberra, which describes a bike ride and the animals that live near, if not in, Parliament House. This work was described as ‘engaging’ in The Canberra Times. Her blog as pscottier.com is updated with a new poem nearly every Tuesday, and she even reads poems in public.Craig Cormick is an award-winning Canberra author. He has published over a dozen books, including eight collections of short fiction. He will have two books published in 2011: In Bed With Douglas Mawson: Travels in Antarctica, based on an an Antarctic Arts Fellowship he received in 2008, and Saved from the Sea, a collection of essays on shipwreck survivors. Captain Cook is a recurring theme in several of his stories, and ‘The Last Island in the World’ is from a work of linked stories that seems to eternally be in progress, The Seven Voyage of Captain Cook.Rico Craig is a writer and creative writing teacher, currently sharing his time between poetry, prose and working on pantomime scripts with school students. Recent work has been published at Cordite and Doctor T.J Eckleburg Review, and is forthcoming in Meanjin. For links to publications please visit: https://ricoandhisroboteye.wordpress.comSean Crawley writes short stories, songs, non-fiction and the odd angry letter which he occasionally sends. He won the Hervey Bay Arts Council Short Story Award in 2015 and has been published online and in anthologies, the most recent being The 2016 Newcastle Short Story Award. Sean has worked in education, mental health and once owned a video shop in a dying town. He writes early in the morning at his desk currently located on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.Judith Crispin is a poet, musician and artist. She has a PhD from the ANU and has done a bunch of post-doctoral research in Paris and Berlin. Judith runs poetry readings at Manning Clark House and is employed by the Australian Catholic University as director of academic and creative research for the Julfa Project. Her images are exhibited in international festivals and her first collection of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers, was published last year by Puncher and Wattmann (https://puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/the-myrrh-bearers). A collection of Tanami desert photographs and poems, The Lumen Seed, will be published by Daylight Books in 2016.Emily Crocker writes and performs poetry. You might have seen her at BAD!SLAM!, Noted Festival, Unspoken Words, StoryFest, or Word in Hand. Her debut chapbook ‘Girls and Buoyant’ was published last year by Subbed In. She is also on the team that brings you Enough Said in Wollongong, and can be found studying at the University of Wollongong. Nathan Curnow is a poet, playwright and performer who has toured Australia and New Zealand and been heard widely on ABC radio. With further assistance from the Australia Council he is currently writing a new play based upon convict stories and escape myths. He is the author of The Ghost Poetry Project, a collection of poetry released by Puncher & Wattman. A father of four young children, poet Nathan Curnow became increasingly interested in how language works to both terrify and embolden us. This was most apparent when his daughter became afraid of bunyips, a fear that could not be relieved by any amount of her parents’ loving persuasion. After months of sleepless nights it was suddenly undone by the words of another child who told her that bunyips only eat avocadoes. He is the most recent winner of the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and is an editor ofGoing Down Swinging.Christopher Currie is a 29-year-old writer from Brisbane. The Ottoman Motel is his first novel. You can find more of his work at Furious Horses.Eric Yoshiaki Dando was born in Japan in 1970. He is an idiot. (For a less biased bio go to his Wiki Bio and for more of his work go to his blog.)Zoe Dattner is General Manager of SPUNC, the Small Press Network, and Creative Director of Sleepers Publishing.Rjurik Davidson has written short stories, essays, screenplays and reviews. His collection The Library of Forgotten Books will soon be published by PS Publishing. He was has won a number of awards and is currently associate editor of Overland magazine.Toby Davidson is a lecturer in Australian literature at Macquarie University. He is the editor of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011) and author of the critical study Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry (2013), part of New York publisher Cambria Press’s landmark Australian literature series. His debut collection is Beast Language(Five Islands Press, 2012).Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist and speechwriter. He has published seven books and been a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Walkley Book Award, as well as being short listed for the Anne Elder Award. In 2012, Joel had a stroke and lost the ability to write poetry. His new poetry collection, Year of the Wasp, tracks his struggle to rediscover a poetic voice.Tricia Dearborn’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals including Meanjin, Southerly, Overland and HEAT, and in anthologies such as Australian Poetry Since 1788, The Best Australian Poems 2012 and 2010 and Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. A featured reader at many events, including the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2012, Tricia was joint winner of the 2008 Poets Union Poetry Prize. She has degrees in biochemistry and arts, worked briefly in a research laboratory and now earns a living as a freelance editor. Her most recent collection of poetry is The Ringing World, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2012.Jacqui Dent has had short works published in Voiceworks, The Emerging Writer, Arts Hub and broadcast on ABC Radio National. Visit her at www.jacquident.netDemet Divaroren has a diploma in professional writing and editing from Victoria University. Her short stories have appeared in Island magazine and Scribe’s New Australian Stories anthology. Demet’s first novel Orayt was shortlisted in the 2008 Australian/Vogel literary award. She is represented by Curtis Brown Literary agents and lives in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.Benjamin Dodds is the author of Regulator(Puncher & Wattmann Poetry, 2014). His work has appeared in Best Australian Poems 2014, Meanjin,Cordite and on Radio National’s Poetica program. He blogs at benjamindodds.wordpress.com and tweets @coalesce79.Tom Doig has been published in The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Sleepers Almanac and Voiceworks magazine. His plays include Survival of the Prettiest, Hitlerhoff and Selling Ice to the Remains of the Eskimos. Tom is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, researching the lived experience of climate change in Australia. Moron to Moron is his first book.Joe Dolce is a singer, songwriter, composer and poet. Writer and performer of the most successful Australian song in history. His poetry appeared in Best Australian Poems 2015 & 2014. He was shortlisted for both the Newcastle Poetry Prize and Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize in 2014. Winner of the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup. Published in Meanjin, Monthly, Southerly, Cordite,Canberra Times, Quadrant, Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Contrappasso, and Antipodes(US). Recipient of the Advance Australia Award. Presently on staff at the Australian Institute of Music teaching Composition, Ensemble, and Personal Tutoring in setting lyrics and poetry to music.Jane Downing is a writer of poetry and prose with over a hundred and thirty works of prose published in journals including The Big Issue, Southerly, The Griffith Review, Westerly, Island,Overland, Seizure, Hecate, UTS Anthology and Antipodes, and a similar number of poems in journals including Rabbit, Cordite,Social Alternatives, Eureka Streetand Best Australian Poems (2004 and 2015). Her two novels were published by Pandanus Books at the Australian National University (The Trickster, 2003 and The Lost Tribe, 2005). One of her works was the lead story in the Grapple Annual which won the Most Underrated Book of the Year Award in 2015. In 2016 she was one of two Australians shortlisted, out of nearly 4000 entries from 47 countries, for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jane can be found at https://janedowning.wordpress.com/Callie Doyle-Scott would love to write historical fiction for a living, but for the moment is thoroughly enjoying cutting her teeth as a project editor for Verity La. She’s self-published several essays for the CLIO online history journal, as well as a few short stories here and there, including a contribution to a self-published anthology of short stories entitled Around About Town. She’s currently in her final year of a Creative Writing Degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, Kanganoulipian, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).Oliver Driscoll is a Melbourne writer. He is a co-founder of the Slow Canoe Readings and has guest edited an all-fiction online edition of Overland.Daniel East is an Australian writer currently working in Sydney publishing game reviews on Square-Go (square-go.com) and theatre reviews on media culture reviews (reviews.media-culture.org.au). He is a graduate of the University of Wollongong’s Creative Writing program and his poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Voiceworks, Red River Review and are soon to appear in PAN Magazine and cutthroat. His play Sexy Tales of Paleontology (co-written with Patrick Lenton) won the 2010 Sydney Fringe Comedy Award and he is a member of Australia’s only performance-poetry boyband, The Bracket Creeps.Samuel Elliott is a Sydney-based freelance literary and entertainment reporter. Having previously worked for The Australia Times, Elliott now produces a broad range of work for numerous publications in both digital and print. He currently divides his time between two jobs in the television industry and readying his next novel for publication. Find more of his work here.Anne Elvey is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain journal. She holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity. Her publications include Kin (Five Islands, 2014) and This Flesh that You Know (Leaf Press, 2015). White on White is forthcoming from Cordite Books in 2017.Gabrielle Everall completed her PhD in creative writing at The University of Western Australia. While doing the PhD she wrote her second book of poetry, Les Belles Lettres. Her first book of poetry is called Dona Juanita and the love of boys. She has been published in numerous anthologies including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Performance Poets and The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan. She has performed her poetry at the BDO, Overload, NYWF, Emerging Writer’s Festival and Putting on an Act. She has also performed at The Bowery Poetry Club in New York and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She currently studies at Melbourne University.Katelin Farnsworth won the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction in 2015 and came second place in the Rhonda Jankovic Literary Awards in 2017. Her short story ‘Round’ was featured in Award Winning Writing in 2015. Katelin has also been published in various Australian journals including Feminartsy, Lip Magazine, Tincture Journal, The Victorian Writer, Offset, Voiceworks, Verandah Journal, and Writers Bloc, amongst others. She studies Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University and is currently working on a novel (or two!).Peter Farrar has probably done more Biology than writing in 2011 due to the VCE student residing in his house. Despite that, between learning about the cell structure of bacteria, he has reached the second draft of a novel. In 2010 his collection of short stories The Nine Flaws of Affection was published through Ginninderra Press.Caitlin Farrugia is a writer, producer and teacher from Melbourne, Australia. Her pieces reflect ideas of human connection, feminism and child wellbeing. You can follow her at caitlinfarrugia.com or @ohuniverse.Samantha Faulkner is a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal woman from the Wuthuthi/Yadhaigana peoples, Cape York Peninsula and Badu and Moa Islands, Torres Strait. She is the author of Life Blong Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait, published in 2007 by Aboriginal Studies Press. As a member of Us Mob Writing Group she has performed at a number of festivals including Noted (2015-2017) and the AIATSIS Conference (2014 & 2016). She has poetry and prose published locally (By Close of Business, Us Mob Writing Group, 2013, & A Pocketful of Leadership in the ACT, ed. Kerry Reed-Gilbert,2016); nationally (Etchings Indigenous: Treaty, Ilura Press, 2010); and internationally (Ora Nui: A Collection of Maori and Aboriginal Literature, ed. Kerry-Reed Gilbert & Anton Blank, 2014, & Narrative Witness: International Writing Program, University of Iowa, 2016). She has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state and national boards. She is currently Chairperson of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation.Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer of adult fiction – his contemporary dramas plunge into family dynamics, new relationship types, masculinity, history, and the lure of secrets. He is the author of three novellas: The Beach Volcano (Blemish Books, 2014), which has been described as ‘Elegant and original’ (Kerryn Goldsworthy,Sydney Morning Herald), ‘Accomplished – an intense fiction range’ (Peter Pierce,Canberra Times), and ‘Utterly enthralling’ (Walter Mason, Newtown Review of Books), and was recognised with a 2014 Canberra Critics Circle Award; I’m Ready Now (Blemish Books, 2012), which was short-listed for both the 2013 ACT Book of the Year and the 2013 ACT Writing and Publishing Award for Fiction; and Fall on Me (Blemish Books, 2011), which won the 2012 ACT Writing and Publishing Award for Fiction. His novel Remnants (Pandanus Books, 2005) was published to acclaim, as was his story collection Joy (2000). In 2015 Featherstone was commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium to write the libretti for a new work that is being composed by James Humberstone from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Featherstone is also the author of 50 stories published in Australian literary journals including the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, Island, and Overland, as well as in the US. Between 2007 and 2014 he was a frequent contributor to Panorama, the weekend magazine of the Canberra Times, and the Fairfax Media network more broadly. Featherstone has also written for Australian Book Review, BMA Magazine, and Capital. He has been awarded residencies at Varuna (Blue Mountains), Bundanon (Shoalhaven River), and the Kingsbridge Gatekeeper’s Cottage, courtesy of the Launceston City Council, Tasmania; in 2013 he was a Creative Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy/UNSW Canberra. Featherstone was the founding editor of Verity La (2010-2014), for which he received a 2012 Canberra Critics Circle Award. He lives on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. More information atwww.opentopublic.com.auRobert Feeney taught English for six years in Japan before returning home to pursue a Masters in Creative Writing at University College Cork. He is the author of several short stories, articles, plays, and a sitcom script that was kindly rejected by the BBC. His favourite colour is either blue or grey.Duncan Felton is writer and editor living in Canberra. He is a co-coordinator of Scissors Paper Pen, a Canberra creative collective that does many things, notably a quarterly evening of storytelling, music, discussion and more. Duncan’s had worked published in Voiceworks, Block, BMA, Next Wave 2010’s Text Camp Reader and You Are Here 2012’s Mall Stories. Bloggings at duncanwritingeditingpublishing.wordpress.com and writings inspired by found ephemera at sufaj.wordpress.com.Sophie Finlay is a visual artist and poet from Melbourne. She has been a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize, the Mt Buller Art Prize, and winner of the ‘She Who Inspires’ Art Prize, Walker Street Gallery. She has received a highly commended certificate in the WB Yeats Poetry Prize and her poetry is published in the anthology Shaping the Fractured Self, UWAP, Cordite and Meanjin.SJ Finn’s novel This Too Shall Pass is about to be released by Sleepers Publishing. Her short fiction appears in Going Down Swinging, Sleepers Almanac and as a mini shot for Vignette Press. Her poem ‘War Through The TV’ was included in The Best Australian Poems 2010. She has a website at www.sjfinn.comDavid Finnigan is a pharmacy assistant, theatre-maker and festival director from the Cancers, Australia. More than thirty of David’s one-act and full-length playscripts have been produced by theatres in Australia, the Philippines and the USA. David was 2006 Writer-in-Residence for Tanghalang Pilipino, the key government-funded theatre company in the Philippines. He co-founded interactive science-theatre ensemble Boho Interactive and the Crack Theatre Festival, and was the Creative Producer for the inaugural You Are Here festival in Canberra in 2011. David is curled up online at https://blind-dragonfly.comFinnigan and Brother is the duo of siblings Chris (guitar/FX) and David Finnigan (words/radio/visuals). Finnigan and Brother first performed live at the 2009 Multicultural Fringe Festival in the Cancers. Their work featured in the launch edition of digital zine Goofbang, and their music has been featured on Sydney’s FBI Radio by New Weird Australia and Sunday Night at the Movies. More at https://blind-dragonfly.com/?p=633Scout Fisher both writes and teaches writing. Though he spends most days attempting to unfold his origami-shaped thoughts.Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney. He twitters here.David Francis, originally from Australia, has lived mostly in the United States since 1985. His first novel Agapanthus Tango was published internationally in seven languages and then in the United States as The Great Inland Sea. He received the Australian Literature Fund Fellowship to the Keesing Studio in Paris in 2002 and returns to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris each year. The film rights to The Great Inland Sea have been optioned by Serena Films in France. His second novel, Stray Dog Winter has been released in Australia and the U.S. and was named “Book of the Year” in The Advocate, “Australian Novel of the Year” in the Australian Literary Review, received the commendation of the Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Award, was a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award, won the 2009 Audiofile Award, and is receiving the American Library Association, Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literary Award for 2010. His short stories and articles have appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Weekly Times, The Advocate, Wet Ink, The Southern California Reviw, The Elegant Variation, Best Australian Short Stories 2010 and The Harvard Review. He is currently collaborating on the screenplay of The Great Inland Sea and film rights to Stray Dog Winter have been optioned in Australia. See www.straydogwinter.com.Jane Frank lives and writes in Brisbane. Her poems have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Writ, Communion, Snorkel, London Grip, Yellow Chair Review, Antiphon and elsewhere. She teaches in Humanities at Griffith University.Benjamin Frater (27 February 1979 – 4 July 2007) was a talented and original poet who after many years suffering from schizophrenia died at 28. Pretty much unknown to the wider poetry community his only publication was Bughouse Meat (2003) a chapbook. At the time of his death he was working on Preyed Hotel a fragmentary epic centred on the Green Acre Tavern (where his father is licensee) but which also grows out of the joys and sufferings which marked so much of Ben’s life. From the age of 19 he kept returning to the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, where he was about a semester away from finishing his degree. (Having him on campus for nine years was like having a permanent Writer in Residence!)
Three things dominated Ben’s life: poetry, his illness and the devotion between him, his family and friends. Of course schizophrenia could make him a very demanding person at times (though the greatest demands were alas on Ben) but he was also extremely giving. As a friend and as a poet he was not a snob, and although his work was high powered and erudite, to the point of appearing elitist to some, this was a man who loved the work of Nick Cave and The Doors, who could surprise everyone by bursting into Country and Western numbers, and who loved playing the pokies at the Illawarra Leagues Club accompanied by a schooner of Guinness. He could use the world ‘yes!’ in conversation with great force, with his other aural trademark being a good natured giggle.
With the exception of the great Francis Webb it is not in an Australian poet’s job description that they be rhapsodic, surreal and visionary. Well this is where Ben came in and even went one better, creating ‘visions’ out of Campbelltown (his home town) Greenacre and Wollongong, with acres of his imagination populated by amongst other beings threatening minatours and scorpions, true, but above all by life affirming yaks. (For whatever reason he called himself the Catholic Yak, whilst this writer was the Protestant Elk!) At times Ben’s poetry may have been large, unwieldy and frequently nightmarish but with his extraordinary humour to back proceedings they were always written for an audience’s enjoyment. Anyone who heard him at his best (his joint book launch with fellow poet Rob Wilson or his recent, and last, recital at the Five Islands Brewery) will attest to this, though the power of his performance was such that like Hendrix at Woodstock he had to go last, no one could follow Ben.
His close friend Habib Zeitouneh tells how at Airds High School Ben was part of an ‘arty’ group which was respected because of their ability at winning debating competitions and academic prizes. In year 12 he organized a reading in the Matador Room at his father’s Golf View Hotel, Guilford with over one hundred hearing him read his own work, with his grandmother Florence Bond as special guest. Habib describes Florence was Ben’s first ‘go to person’ in poetry. Ten years later it was Ben who had this role, however briefly, among many younger writers of Wollongong. Earlier with Rob Wilson, Tim Cahill and Ben Michell he had formed the Syntactical Activists, a group dedicated to poetry and undergrad goodtimes. With Rob he instituted ‘shoot outs’ marathon phone calls where each bombarded the other with words, phrases and indeed poems. Ben, although forced by his illness to so often operate on his own was still a very loyal colleague to all.
Ben’s love of poetry started with such adolescent staples as Pound, Eliot, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Beats. This expanded to include the Russian Futurists (who helped him find new verse directions) Francis Webb (whom he felt was Australia’s greatest poet) and the problematic Antonin Artaud (who could cause him great suffering). His great love was Allen Ginsberg, about whom and whose work Ben probably knew more than anyone in the country. Even better Ben’s Ginsberg was not that tiresome beatnik/hippy media construct but the serious, well educated poet who saw himself in a tradition extending back to Walt Whitman, William Blake, John Milton and Edmond Spencer. This was a club that at no matter how junior a level Ben wished to join. I once called him at the Greenacre Tavern, as basic a pub as any in southwest Sydney, and there he was in the bar reading Spencer’s The Fairy Queen! It was out of such (seeming) incongruities that much of his verse was assembled.
Ben’s illness combined with a quite strong reserve meant he never appeared throughout Australia on any reading or festival circuit. Nor did he submit many poems to journals. Outside of Wollongong he once read in the open section at Melbourne’s John Barleycorn Hotel and last September in Campbelltown at Mad Pride an event centred around artists and writers suffering similarly to Ben who wished to show that psychotic afflictions didn’t invalidate what they produced. His success there was a great fillip to Ben and this plus the love of his fiancée poet Alise Blayney and the friendship of many Wollongong writers helped in the promise of greater things. Only hours before his death all were discussing an appearance at the forthcoming Newcastle Young Writer’s Festival.
Like similar ambitious poets (Fernando Pessoa, Thomas Lovell Beddoes) who died with gigantic plans less than fulfilled, Ben left boxes and notebooks of poems drafts and fragments. Will Australian literature be able to accommodate a young, near to unknown, non-careerist, yet extremely prolific deceased poet? We hope so. Volumes are being planned. He is survived by his parents Howard and Denise, siblings Mathew, Nicole and Shane, a niece and nephews, Alise and many friends.
(Alan Wearne, in memoriam, 1998)Braden Karl Frederiksen has been experimenting publicly with the form and function of his writing for a few short years. His interest in writing began as a mature-aged student of philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, and has been motivated by a desire to overcome his social phobias. Brad has received a huge amount of constructive support for his writing from many well respected authors. He has found friends and lost friends, and he ‘believes’ that if you have not already, you should. Brad can be found, and lost, at Maekitso’s Café.Janet Frishberg lives and writes in a light blue room in San Francisco. She’s currently editing her first book, a memoir. You can find her work in Literary Orphans, sparkle & blink, the SF Chronicle, and soon in Cease, Cows, and Black Heart Magazine. You can find her on Twitter via @jfrishberg.Lisa Fuller is a Wuilli Wuilli woman from Eidsvold, Queensland, and is also a descendent of the Wakka Wakka and Gurang Gurang mobs. An emerging writer, she has had a short story and some poems published in Etchings Indigenous: Treaty, and poetry published in UMW’s anthology, By Close of Business. As Editorial and Production Officer at Aboriginal Studies Press, she was lucky enough to attend the 2014 Residential Editorial Program. Lisa has a Masters of Creative Writing and is the joint winner of the 2014 Anne Edgeworth Fellowship. Lisa recently won the 2018 Varuna Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship, and has won the 2017 David Unaipon Award for her book Mirrored Pieces. A member of Us Mob Writing, she is passionate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples writing, and culturally appropriate publishing. She is a current member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN).Alice Gage is the founding editor of Sydney-based curiosity journal Ampersand Magazine. She is a co-director of the live publishing collective I Can Draw You A Picture, and she is helping to build a Librarium (part library, part aquarium) at Redfern ARI, Bill & George. She is currently awaiting a callback from Deal Or No Deal. Alice loves magazines, swanky tucker, and the sweet smell of spring.
Published in editions of BLOCK, The Delinquent, Eve’s Harvest and by REM Magazine, Andrew Galan co-founded Canberra poetry slam BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT! and has performed as part of the Corinbank, Canberra Fringe and This is Not Art festivals. He co-hosted the poetry slam and midnight poetry feast at the Australian National Folk Festival in 2010 and 2011, and regularly growls poetry with spoken-word band The Tragic Troubadours. Andrew has words forthcoming with Streetcake, The Delinquent and MAYDAY magazines. Read his blog Huitzilihuitl’s Reign of Death.ANGELA GARDNER’s first poetry collectionParts of Speech (UQP, 2007) won the Thomas Shapcott Arts Queensland Poetry Prize. Her most recent collections are The Told World(Shearsman Books, UK, 2014) and Thing & Unthing(Vagabond Press, 2014). She is also a visual artist and edits atwww.foame.org.Juan Garrido-Salgado is a political refugee who immigrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the regime that burned his poetry and imprisoned and tortured him for his political activism. He has published five books of poetry and his poems have been widely published in a variety of literary journals. He has translated works into Spanish from John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, Judith Beveridge, Dorothy Porter, MTC Cronin, Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, including Cronin’s Talking to Neruda’s Questions (2004). He has translated five Aboriginal poets for Espejo de Tierra/Earth Mirror Poetry Anthology (2008). One of his stories has been published in the anthology Joyful Strains — Making Australia Home, edited by Kent MacCarter & Ali Lemur (2013). With Steve Brock and Sergio Holas, Garrido-Salgado also translated The Trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology (2014) into English.K W George is a Brisbane-based writer. She studied creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology, and has a master’s degree in Australian Gothic Literature. She has been published in Meanjin, Tincture, Going Down Swinging, WQ, and three Margaret River Press anthologies. In 2015 she was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards in the Emerging Author / Unpublished Manuscript section.Ian Gibbins is a poet, electronic musician and video artist, having been a neuroscientist for more than 30 years and professor of anatomy for 20 of them. His poetry covers diverse styles and media, including electronic music, video, performance, art exhibitions, and public installations, and has been widely published in print and online, including three books with accompanying electronic music: Urban Biology (2012); The Microscope Project: How Things Work (2014); and Floribunda (2015), the last two in collaboration with visual artists. For more info, see www.iangibbins.com.au.David Gilbey’s first poetry collection was Death & the Motorway (Interactive, 2008). Selections of his poems were included in Under the Rainbow (fourW press,1996) andthe noise of exchange:Twelve Australian Poets (ASM Poetry, Macao). Some of his haibun have been collected in Downunder Japan and Forty Stories (2012 & 2010, Fine Line Press, NZ). David is a founder of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, current President of Booranga Writers’ Centre and Editor of fourW: new writing. He is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University. Three times he has been a Visiting Professor of English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University, in Sendai, Japan and has been a regular broadcaster/reviewer on ABC Riverina.D. Gilson is the author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry, 2015); Crush (Punctum Books, 2014), with Will Stockton; Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (2012), winner of the Robin Becker Prize. He is a PhD candidate in American literature and cultural studies at The George Washington University, and his work has appeared in PANK, The Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and as a notable in Best American Essays. Find D. at dgilson.com.Irma Gold is an award-winning writer of short fiction and her debut collection, Two Steps Forward, which was published by Affirm Press in September 2011. She is also the author of two children’s books, editor of a number of anthologies, and is working on her first novel for which she was awarded a place on Varuna Writers’ Centre’s LongLines Program. She blogs for Overland literary journal.Linda Godfrey — Poet. Writer. Editor. Program Manager of the Wollongong Writers Festival. Curator of Rocket Readings, readings of poetry and an open mic, part of the Sydney Writers Festival and Wollongong Writers Festival. Series editor of microliterature anthologies, reader, manuscript assessor, teacher, judge. Fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies.Andrea Goldsmith originally trained as a speech pathologist and was a pioneer in the development of communication aids for people unable to speak. Her first novel, Gracious Living, was published in 1989. This was followed by Modern Interiors, then Facing the Music,Under the Knife and The Prosperous Thief, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award. Her literary essays have appeared in Heat, Meanjin,Australian Book Review,Best Australian Essays and numerous anthologies. She has taught creative writing throughout Australia, and has mentored several new writers. She lives in inner Melbourne. The poet, Dorothy Porter, who died in 2008, was Andrea’s partner.Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant who reads voraciously and writes fiction as it often makes more sense than government. Robert has been a judge in the fiction category of the Ned Kelly Awards since 2008 and is using that experience to springboard into a new career of literary review. But just to prove that it is not the case that “those who can’t critique”, he has made the short list two years running in the Ned Kelly SD Harvey Short Story Award for crime writing. Of his 2011 entry, the judges praised his ability to write a short story in which something actually happens. Robert lives in Bondi with his wife and two young children and is currently in the middle of writing at least three novels, one of which might actually get finished.Alan Gould has published 20 books, seven fiction titles, twelve poetry titles, and one collection of essays. His literary awards include NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry 1981 (for Astral Sea), Angus And Robertson Fellowship 1983 and Foundation For Australian Literary Studies Best Book Of The Year, 1985 (for The Man Who Stayed Below), National Book Council Banjo Award for Fiction 1992 (for To The Burning City), TDK Audio Book Of The Year 1998 (for The Tazyrik Year), The Philip Hodgins Memorial Award 1999, Co-winner Courier Mail Book Of The Year 2000, and co-winner ACT Book Of The Year 2000 (for The Schoonermaster’s Dance), The Grace Leven Award 2006 (for The Past Completes Me – Selected Poems 1973-2003), short-listing for The Prime Minister’s Fiction Award 2010 (for The Lakewoman).Ray Greener is a Sydney based writer and critic. His poetry, fiction and essays have been rejected by numerous literary journals, and he is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing on the topic, ‘Are PhDs in Creative Writing a waste of time?’ At the moment he is working on a collection of stories, a novel in stories, a discontinuous narrative, a memoir, a young adult novel, a literary novel, a sonnet sequence and a collection of essays.Charlotte Guest is a Western Australian writer and Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing. Her writing has appeared in Griffith Review, Overland, Westerly, Voiceworks, Cordite, Writ Poetry Review and elsewhere.Glenda Guest’s novel Siddon Rock (Vintage 2009) won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book Award, and was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize Best First Book (the Glenda Adams Prize), and short-listed in the Australian Book Industry Awards’ best debut writer section. As well as fiction, Glenda has written and/or edited non-fiction, magazine and journal feature articles, reviews, and a regular literature column. She has worked as a sub-editor, and a literary editor, and was the deputy editor of a monthly arts magazine. As well as teaching creative writing at Macquarie and Griffith Gold Coast universities, Glenda has organised and taught writing workshops at various levels to vastly different groups, for example teenagers (Blacktown young people’s workshop), and adult writing and literature workshops, including for Adult Education, and one-off annual online tutorials in short story with year 11 English students. Glenda Guest’s website can be found here; she is available for manuscript assessment and writer mentoring.Molly Guy is writer of short stories and poetry. Has had four books published, a novel, two collections of short stories and a book of poetry. Currently working on a new collection of poetry.

Ceinwen Hall is an Australian emerging figurative artist. Ceinwen studied painting at the National Art School in Sydney and is currently undertaking a Master of Art Therapy. She works primarily in oil paint and her work is highly conceptual; often considered for months before she commences painting. Major themes in her work include issues such as feminism, environmental concerns and mental illness.

Ceinwen was born in Dubbo, NSW. She moved to Sydney from the Southern Highlands in 2010 to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School. She then spent time in the remote community of Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria, NT where she worked closely with the elders at Waralungku Arts Centre. Ceinwen has been adopted into Gudanji community and is proud of supporting Aboriginal art and culture as well as sharing what knowledge was imparted to her to keep Gudanji culture strong.

Phillip Hall has worked for many years as a ‘wilderness’ expedition leader throughout NSW & Far North Queensland; but since 2011 he has worked in remote Indigenous education in Borroloola, the Gulf of Carpentaria. Phillip designs sport and Outdoor/Environmental Education programs designed to teach emotional resiliency, cooperative group learning, safe decision-making and respect for Country. He has been adopted into Gudanji family; where he is also known by the skin name of Jabala and the traditional or bush name of Gijindarraji (given to him because it was the bush name of his nana’s pop); he is a member of the Rrumburriya clan; and is a Jungkayi (custodian) for Jayipa (Catfish Hole). His Mother is the emu and goanna though his nana jokes that his real Dreaming is the curlew or ‘Worry Bird’. Phillip has completed a Doctor of Creative Arts at Wollongong University where he researched Australian poetry, contemporary place theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism. For many years Phillip has published his poetry in such journals as Antipodes, Five Bells, Meanjin, Plumwood Mountain, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly and Westside. Phillip’s most recent book is Sweetened in Coals and is published with Ginninderra Press.Stu Hatton’s debut collection of poems is How to be Hungry. His work has appeared in The Age, Overland, Cordite and elsewhere. He has also been known to blog at www.stuhatton.net. He lives in Melbourne.Ashley Haywood is a writer, editor and poet. She has seen her creative and scholarly work published and performed in Australia and overseas. She recently received a PhD for her creative research thesis titled Harlequin Blue and The Picasso Experiment. Some of her most recent creative work appears in TEXT and Spineless Wonders’ anthology Out of Place. This ekphrasis poem belongs to a growing collection of iterations, another of which is forthcoming in Southerly. She is an Associate Editor at Rochford Street Review.Tim Heffernan lives in Wollongong where he is an active member of the South Coast Writers Centre. He was born in Hay, on the banks of the Murrumbidgee and after spending most of his life swimming upstream, has mysteriously ended up on the coast. He first published in the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser in 1985 and in 2015 was commended in the Joanne Burns Prize for his prose poem ‘butterflies in Iraq’, published in Spineless Wonders’ anthology Out of Place.Gail Hennessy has been published widely in newspapers, literary supplements, journals and anthologies over the last forty years. In 2010 her collection, Witnessing, brought many of these published poems together with new poetry. Witnessing followed her Doctoral thesis, ‘Testiminio: Witnessing my Mother’s Life: Race and Identity in Twentieth Century Australia’. She has completed a second collection of poetry soon to be published.Ben Hession is a Wollongong based writer. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street,International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite, and Can I Tell You A Secret?, the Don Bank Live Poets anthology. Ben’s poem, ‘A Song of Numbers’, was shortlisted for the 2013 Australian Poetry Science Poetry Prize. He is due to have a poem published in the upcoming issue of Mascara Literary Review. Ben is also a music journalist and a broadcaster on community radio.Matt Hetherington is a writer, music-maker, and moderate self-promoter living in Brisbane. He has been writing poetry for over 30 years, and has published 4 poetry collections and over 300 poems. His first all-haiku/senryu collection For Instance was published in March 2015 by Mulla Mulla Press. He is also on the board of the Australian Haiku Society.Paul Hetherington has published eight collections of poetry. He won the ACT Book of the Year Award (for Shadow Swimmer) and the ANUTECH Poetry Prize and was awarded a Chief Minister’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship in 2002. His verse novel Blood and Old Belief was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and the Colin Roderick Award. He edited and introduced the final three volumes of the National Library of Australia’s four-volume edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend (volume four of which was shortlisted for the Manning Clark House National Cultural Awards). He is one of the founding editors of the online journal Axon: Creative Explorations (2011–). He teaches and researches at the University of Canberra.Amanda Hickey writes reviews for Verity La. She is a Sydney-based journalist, filmmaker and lazy blogger with a passion for the arts, peace and social justice. Amanda worked for many years in news and current affairs at SBS TV. She is the Australian producer of We Are Many, an international documentary feature about the global peace protest of 2003 to stop the invasion of Iraq. Her earlier work includes the award-winning documentary Victor Chang: King of Hearts, and Shimmer in the City, a film about urban Aboriginal art. A short film (2013) she made for Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Lionhearts, can be viewed here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=456nDqFbIg8 She blogs at https://amandahickeyblog.wordpress.com/Amy Hilhorst is a Perth poet and PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia. Her research investigates poetic conceptions of psychosis in the work of Francis Webb, Bruce Beaver, and Michael Dransfield. Amy’s creative and critical work is published or forthcoming in Writ Review, Trove, Cordite, Westerly New Creative, and Rochford Street Review. amyhilhorst@wordpress.com @AmyHilhorstErin Holmwood has recently completed a degree in Professional Writing and Publishing. She is currently working in Perth typing and proofreading for a property valuation company. In her spare time she is either reading, writing, cooking, or watching movies with her awesome partner and her puppy. She would also like to send all her love to her family. If you would like to see more of her musings about general absurdities, feel free to browse her blog at https://erinthefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/.Gregory Horne is a teacher and writer. His poems have been published in literary journals across the country, most recently Meanjin, Rabbit and Going Down Swinging. He lives with his wife and three children in the Blue Mountains NSW.Kathryn Hummel is the author of Poems from Here (Hobart: Walleah Press), The Bangalore Set (Bangalore: Kena Artists’ Initiative), The Body That Holds (Adelaide: Little Windows Press), splashback (Sydney: Stale Objects dePress) and the forthcoming Lamentville (Singapore: Math Paper Press). Uncollected, her digital media/poetry, non-fiction, fiction and scholarly research has been published and presented worldwide. Winner of the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Dorothy Porter Award for poetry (2013), Kathryn’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2013), The Atlas Review’s Open Non-Fiction Chapbook competition (2016) and was shortlisted for the 2017 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Kathryn holds a PhD for studies in narrative ethnography and lives intermittently in South Asia. Her activities can be tracked @ kathrynhummel.com.Rose Hunter is the author of three books of poetry: You As Poetry (Texture Press, Oklahoma), [four paths] (Texture Press), and to the river (Artistically Declined Press, Oregon). A chapbook of her poems is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press (Chicago), and she will appear in the anthology Bend River Mountain (Regime Books). She has been published in such journals as Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Regime, Geist,New World Writing, DIAGRAM, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Doctor T. J Eckleburg Review. She is from Australia originally, lived in Toronto, Canada, for ten years, and is now in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. More information about Rose is available on her website Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home.Andy Jackson has been recently published in journals such as Blue Dog, Heat and Going Down Swinging, awarded grants from Arts Victoria and the Australia Council, and won the 2008 Rosemary Dobson Prize for an unpublished poem. His collection, Among the Regulars, was published in 2010 by papertiger media. The book is available at Collected Works, Readings Carlton, Red Wheelbarrow (in East Brunswick), Brunswick Bound, on-line through https://www.papertigermedia.com/ and yes of course any ‘good’ bookshop can order it in.Mark William Jackson’s work has appeared in various journals including; Best Australian Poems, Popshot, Going Down Swinging, Cordite, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Verity La and Tincture. For more information visit https://markwmjackson.comMiguel Jacq is a French-Australian writer. He lives in Melbourne, Australia where he runs (some say ruins) an I.T business. For a time he co-edited the online journal Blue Hour Magazine. His work has been published by The Blue Hour Press, Dagda, Deep Water Literary Journal, Kind Of A Hurricane Press, The Poetry Jar, Vox Poetica, PRISM Journal and Visible Ink.Colin James has a chapbook out from Thunderclap Press. He works in Energy Conservation and is a great admirer of the Scottish landscape painter, John Mackenzie….Rebecca Jessen lives in Toowoomba with her cactus. She is the winner of the 2013 Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author for her verse novel Gap. In 2012 Rebecca won the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. Rebecca’s writing has been published in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Stilts, Scum Mag and Rex. Rebecca graduated from QUT in 2011 with a BFA in Creative and Professional Writing.
Rebecca’s verse novel Gap is out now through University of Queensland Press. She is the recipient of an AMP Tomorrow Maker grant.Tiggy Johnson is a Brisbane writer whose stories and poems have appeared in various literary magazines and on Melbourne trains. She was awarded 2nd prize in the Herald-Sun Short Story Competition 2004. Her short story collection Svetlana or otherwise was published in 2008 and her poetry collection First taste in 2010. For more, go to www.tiggyjohnson.com.

HeatherTaylorJohnson’s third book of poetry is Thirsting for Lemonade (IP, 2013) and her first novel is Pursuing Love and Death (HarperCollins, 2013). She is the poetry editor for Transnational Literature and a reviewer of poetry and fiction for a variety of journals in both Australia and America.Toni Jordan’s debut novel, the international best-seller Addition, was published in 2008 and shortlisted for both the Barbara Jefferis award and the ABIA best general fiction book, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and won best debut fiction in the 2008 Indie awards.Addition was published in 16 countries. Her second novel, Fall Girl, was published in November 2010 in Australia and will be published next year in the UK, Germany, France and Taiwan. Toni teaches Novel at RMIT University and writes a weekly column in theAge. She has also written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Herald Sun and the Monthly. She is published Text.Raphael Kabo is a slam poet, quiet poet, and writer, whose heart is split between too many places and people. He has been published in Burley, The Grapple Annual, and Gargouille, and performed at poetry slams in Australia and the UK. Having finished university last year, he is now relearning how to read for pleasure. Find out more about Raphael on his website.J Kane currently resides in the Blue Mountains of Australia (and at the moment is reading Francis Picabia).Leah Kaminsky is a writer and a practicing family physician. She is the recipient of many awards, grants and fellowships, including the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship for Fiction (2007), a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2010), Rosebank Fellowship, Grace Marion Trust Fellowship at Glenfern and Bayside writer-in-residence(2010/11). She is editor of an anthology of prominent physician-writers, The Pen and the Stethoscope (Scribe Publishing, 2010). Her collection of poetry, Stitching Things Together, is published by Interactive Press (2010). She is completing an MFA in Fiction Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA.AngeleneKaras is a Masters of Teaching (Secondary) student in her final year at Western Sydney University. She is currently volunteering at a Sydney non-for-profit poetry based company. Her poetry has been previously published in the CrUWSible magazine and The Wild Goose e-Literary Magazine. Angelene enjoys The Simpsons, coffee and of course, poetry.Tarion Keelan was born in Nottingham, England, in the shadow of the statue of Robin Hood. Such proximity to the past started a passion for history that has lasted to this day. Tarion came to Australia at 16, and studied history and literature at Wollongong University before moving into teaching and writing. Although he has written all his life in one form or another, and one of his short stories was Highly Commended in the 2009 Feast Writing competition (https://www.gay-ebooks.com.au/fea09info.html), Dancing With the Daffodils is his first novel. He lives quietly near the sea on the NSW South Coast with his partner, Bob, two dogs and three cats.khulud khamis is a Palestinian feminist writer, author of Haifa Fragments, published by Spinifex Press (Australia), New Internationalist (UK), and translated into Italian and Turkish. Born to a Slovak mother and a Palestinian father, khulud grew up in two countries and between two cultures, her identity composed of both, and her multicultural background is reflected in her writing. She writes fiction, poetry and nonfiction. In her fiction, poetry, as well as non-fiction, she deals with political and social issues as they relate to and affect women’s lives, striving to bring forth local marginalised and unheard voices. khulud is a member of the radical feminist collective Isha L’Isha – Haifa Feminist Centre, where she has been an activist for many years, fighting for the rights of the most marginalised groups of women, and the co-founder of the Tuskuteesh grassroots project: a safe space for Arab women to share testimonies of sexual violence. She lives with her daughter in Haifa. Find khulud on her website, on Facebook and on Twitter @khulud_khamis.Emily Kiddell is a Melbourne-based writer and bookseller. She is currently working on her first novel.Robert Knapman works with words and images. Equal parts writer/poet and photographer, he often combines the two in his visual poetry. Robert was born and raised in Sydney surrounded by art, music and theatre and after studying commercial art spent many years in Adelaide where he worked in the social services and was a performing artist. After living in Germany teaching English, and adventuring in many of the world’s corners he is again back in Sydney working in the fields of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender health and safety. He has been involved in several Sydney exhibitions and performances and has had been published online and in several publications. His work can be seen at www.redbubble.com/people/arjaykay.

Mike Ladd was born to Australian parents in Berkeley, California in 1959, but grew up at Blackwood in the Adelaide hills. He has published 9 books of poetry and prose, including the haibun Karrawirra Parri: Walking the Torrens from Source to Sea. His latest collection, Invisible Mending, was published by Wakefield Press in 2016. Mike was the founding producer and editor of Poetica, ABC Radio National’s weekly poetry program, which ran from 1997 to 2015.

Tamara Lazaroff recently beganrelearning her first language, Macedonian, at Macquarie University, and during her final year there she had the opportunity to travel and study in Macedonia. She is currently writing a collection of short stories based on this experience — some are non-fiction, some are fiction, and some bridge the boundaries between. A few of these stories have been published in Australian literary journals (Meanjin, Transnational Literature, and Hecate). She is also passionately involved in developing zine culture and community in Brisbane through festivals (ZICS), workshops, and other events. Lesley Lebkowicz is an award-winning Canberra writer of prose and poetry. Her most recent book The Way Things Really Are (Buddhanet, 2006) was a collaborative translation of the earliest Buddhist verse cycle. She has recently completed a verse narrative, The Petrov Poems, and is now working on an essay about her ordination as a Buddhist nun.

Rosanna Licari is an Australian poet and writer. Her work has won the Thomas Shapcott, the Anne Elder and the Michel Wesley Wright Poetry Prizes, and she has been included in various anthologies including the Best Australian Poems, Idiom 23, fourW: New Writing, Australian Love Poems, and Global Poetry. She won the inaugural Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award in 2015. Website: www.rosannalicari.comNathaniel Lindsay is a filmmaker and screenwriter. He plans to retire to the Azores.Bronwyn Lovell is a writer living in Adelaide, Australia. Her work has appeared in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Antipodes, Cordite, Australian Love Poems, Australian Poetry Journal and Strange Horizons. Her poetry has won the Val Vallis Award and the Adrien Abbott Poetry Prize; been shortlisted for the Fair Australia, Newcastle, Bridport and Montreal prizes; and nominated for a Rhysling Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She is a PhD candidate at Flinders University, where she is researching depictions of women in space in real life and science fiction stories, while composing a verse novel about a female astronaut on a mission to Mars. Her essay ‘Science Fiction’s Women Problem’ gained international attention and was a finalist for the CHASS Australia Prize for a Student. You can find her online at bronwynlovell.com or follow her on Twitter @lovellybronwyn.Ramon Loyola is a writer, editor, legal author and lawyer. Born and raised in the Philippines, he holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Pharmacy from the University of the Philippines, a Master of Law and Legal Practice and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). After working in a variety of roles — including as a clinical pharmacist, public and media relations specialist, television scriptwriter, magazine editor and medical writer — Ramon came to Australia in 1995 and worked as a court clerk, court registrar and manager, before becoming a lawyer in 2005 and working full-time in various government legal agencies while also writing for legal professional publications.
Ramon’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction and legal and medical writing have appeared in various publications. He published two collections of poetry in 2014, not poems, just words and I Look For You in Other Truths. not poems, just words was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards (USA) for Poetry in 2014.
New Melbourne-based small press In Short Publishing Company has also published one of Ramon’s short stories, Words That Don’t Mean Anything, as part of a series of stand-alone pocketbooks in 2015. His latest book is The Heaving Pavement (2015), an experimental memoir in poetic, prose and illustrated forms about his struggle with anxiety. He lives in inner-Sydney’s Newtown.Justin Lowe was born in Sydney but spent significant portions of his childhood on the Spanish island of Minorca with his younger sister and artist mother. He developed a penchant for writing poetry while penning lyrics for a succession of failed bands and has since been published all over the world. Justin currently resides in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where he edits poetry blog Bluepepper. His books can be purchased at the Bluepepper Bookstore https://www.thecarnivalbookstore.blogspot.com.au,Douglas Luman is the Book Reviews editor for the Found Poetry Review, an intern at the Chicago School of Poetics, and an MFA candidate at George Mason University. He is sleeping in a library somewhere in Northern Virginia.Chris Lynch grew up in Papua New Guinea and is now based in Melbourne. His poetry has appeared in Cordite, Tincture Journal, Apex Magazine, Blackmail Press, Islet, Peril Magazine, SpeedPoets, Stars Like Sand: Australian speculative poetry, and the Poetry & Place Anthology 2015, among others. Currently working on his first collection of poetry, he blogs occasionally at www.chrislynch.com.au.XXXXXXXX-born Australian poet Ian McBryde was born in XXXXXX inXXXX. He has had XXXpoetry collections published, among them XXXXXX andXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX, which were short-listed for the XXX XXXX XX XXX XXXX and the XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX’X prizes. McBryde has a ‘new and selected’ collection, entitled XX XXX XXXXXXX, coming out later this year from Australia’s XXXXXXXXXXX Press.Kent MacCarter is a writer and resident in Melbourne, where he lives with his wife, two cats and one child. His poetry and a smattering of non-fiction has appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers internationally. He is currently involved on the board of SPUNC: The Small Press Network and is also an active member in Melbourne PEN.Wayne Macauley is a Melbourne writer whose short fiction has been widely published, in Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, Griffith Review, Island and other magazines. His debut novel, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, was published in 2004 to wide acclaim. His second novel, Caravan Story, was a 2007 Readings Book of the Year. Wayne’s latest book is the short fiction collection, Other Stories.Julie Maclean was shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize (Salt), Whitmore and Press Press prizes, and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Poetry Prize (UK). Julie is the author of ‘When I saw Jimi’ (Indigo Dreams) and ‘Kiss of the Viking’ (Poetry Salzburg). Her poetry and short fiction features in leading international journals and The Best Australian Poetry (UQP). She blogs at www.juliemacleanwriter.comAnthony Macris is an award-winning Australian writer and author of the Capital novels. He is also the author of When Horse Became Saw: a family’s journey through autism, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards: Non-fiction category. His most recent book is Inexperience & other stories. He is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.Carol Major was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a schoolgirl and now lives in the Blue Mountains, Australia, a place that captures three landscapes in one. The heart in geography is one of her passions and in addition to writing short stories and novels, she consults on the importance of retaining a sense of place within urban design. Carol holds a master and doctorate degree in creative writing from the University of Technology, Sydney and her work has been published in a variety of formats in Canadian and Australian literary magazines, performance pieces and anthologies.Priya Malik writes because. Tweets @PriyaSometimesSharanya Manivannan was born in India in 1985. She is the author of a book of poems, Witchcraft (2008). Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Drunken Boat, The Nervous Breakdown, Superstition Review, Killing The Buddha, Pratilipi, Dark Sky Magazine and elsewhere. Sharanya can be found online at www.sharanyamanivannan.com.Annerliegh Grace McCall is a Sydney born, Melbourne residing writer.Laura Jean McKay is a writer and a performer and the author of Holiday in Cambodia, published by Black Inc – a short story collection that explores the electric zone where local and foreign lives meet. Her other writing has been published in The Best Australian Stories, The Big Issue, Women of Letters, Going Down Swinging and The Lifted Brow. She is working on her PhD and a novelLouise McKenna was born in the UK and graduated from the University of Leeds with a joint honours degree in English Literature and French. She currently resides in Adelaide, where she works as a nurse and teacher of French. Her first small poetry collection was published by Wakefield Press in 2010. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous Australian and overseas journals, with recent work in this month’s edition of Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize.Shannon McKeogh is a 21-year-old studying Creative Writing at RMIT. She writes poetry, short-stories, reviews and creative non-fiction. Her work has been published at Lip Magazine, Uni Australia and Catalyst. When she’s not studying or writing she’s busy scanning groceries as a check-out chick. She has a non-professional blog at www.freedomtights.wordpress.com.

Hugh McMillan is a poet from South West Scotland, an award winner in several competitions including the Smith/Doorstep Pamphlet Prize, the Callum MacDonald Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. His Selected Poems, Not Actually being in Dumfries, was recently published by Luath Press.

Laura McPhee-Browne is an emerging writer and social worker from Melbourne who is currently living in Toronto. She has had stories and poems published in Seizure, The Suburban Review, and other online magazines and journals. Two of her stories were short-listed for the inaugural Right Now Human Rights Fiction Prize, and a very short story of Laura’s won a competition to be written on the backs of the Writer’s Victoria business cards for 2014. A poem of hers was published in the 2013 WA Poets poetry anthology, ‘Poetry d’amour‘. Her twitter handle is @laurahelenmb and she blogs at www.lauramcpheebrowne.com.Mohammad Ali Maleki is an Iranian poet and avid gardener who has been living in detention on Manus Island for four years. His poem ‘The Strong Sunflower’ was the first work published on Verity La’s Discoursing Diaspora project. Since then, Mohammad’s writing has been published by Bluepepper and by the Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group. He has been a featured poet on Rochford Street Review, and his poems and letters have been included in the Dear Prime Minister project and at the Denmark Festival of Voice. His poem ‘Tears of Stone’ was shortlisted for the Red Room Company’s New Shoots Poetry Prize 2016 and received Special Commendation for extraordinary work in extreme circumstances.Emily Manger writes poetry to distract herself from her PhD in psychology. Her work appears in three Paradise anthologies, and the APC’s Dear Dad father’s day poetry anthology. She enthusiastically attends countless open-mic poetry readings around Melbourne with her identical twin, Bronwen.Kuzhali Manickavel’s collection Insects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings is available from Blaft Publications and can be found at Powell’s Books, Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com. Her work can also be found in Best American Fantasy 3, Subtropics, AGNI Online, anderbo, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. She lives in a small temple town on the coast of South India. For more of her work check out her blog.Namall Manu is currently living in the long grass in Darwin. He does volunteer work at the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre and hopes one day to publish a book of all his memories. He likes to help others.Kirk Marshall is an award-winning Australian writer, and teacher of English Literature and Media (Film and TV Studies) at RMIT University. He is the author of The Signatory (2012; Skylight Press); Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories (2011; Black Rider Press); and A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953. He has written for more than seventy publications, both in Australia and overseas, including Award-Winning Australian Writing, Island, Wet Ink, Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks, Verandah, Visible Ink, fourW, Cordite and Mascara Literary Review. He edits Red Leaves, the English-language/Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. He now suffers migraines in two languages.Jayne Marshall decided to trade her grey, rainy hometown in the UK for sunny Madrid. Since then her creative life has opened wide and now her time is almost fully spent reading and writing. She has started sharing her work in publications like Brittle Star Magazine, Litro and Pikara Magazine, and will soon expand her horizons further with a Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford University (without leaving the Spanish cañas and tapas).Lily Mae Martin was born and grew up in Melbourne, Victoria and developed artistic tendencies from a young age. In 2003 she was elected to join the National Gallery of Victoria’s Young Ambassador Program after hosting her first exhibition. She studied at the Victorian College of the Arts where she obtained a BFA in drawing in 2008. On completion of her degree she was awarded the Lionel Gell travelling scholarship and in 2009 moved to Berlin, and subsequently the UK where she currently resides. To date she has exhibited in Australia, Germany, Britain and the Unites States. You can find more of her work at Lily Mae Martin.

Amanda Marx is the product of a vivid imagination. She lives in Melbourne and is completing a creative arts degree in writing, performance and visual arts. After graduating, she aspires to read without moving her lips.

Luke May writes short stories in-between selling other people’s books and is writing a thesis on Australian and New Zealand fiction. He has a penchant for not winning anything and has appeared in Torpedo and Story To. When not on the frontier he lives in Melbourne.Rachael Mead has had work published in literary journals in Australia, the US, Taiwan and Ireland. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize and her collection, The Sixth Creek, was published by Picaro Press. Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer, and the literary blogger for Crikey. She is a doctoral candidate in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, and a former acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher magazine. Her reviews, stories and articles have appeared in many publications, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Bookslut, AntiTHESIS, Mascara Literary Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Wet Ink, Southerly, Hecate, The Lifted Brow and Torpedo Greatest Hits.Sonja Meyer is a freelance graphic designer with a passion for all things creative. One of her main interests is to express confidence in graphic design as a powerful catalyst for change through sustainable and ethical design practices. Sonja finds inspiration in every nook and cranny, and is currently in the process of extending her portfolio. She would be happy to hear from anyone in need of graphic design work/a shoulder to cry on. Her website is IdentityCrisis.Simonne Michelle-Wells is a theatre critic and has had short fiction published in various publications. She was the recipient of the 2009 Ada Cambridge Prize for biographical short story writing and was awarded a residency at Varuna in 2008 for her first novel. Simonne has been writing a blog on writing called Into the Quiet since 2007 and recently worked as a speech writer for the Lord Mayor of Melbourne (which nearly killed her).Tamara Miles teaches English at Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College in South Carolina. She is a proud member of Irish writer Jane Barry’s online international creativity salon known as That Curious Love of Green and a 2016 contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Recent publications with her writings and artwork include Fall Lines: A Literary Convergence; Love is Love; O’Bheal Five Words; Pantheon; Love is Love; Unlost Journal; Apricity;TheTishman Review; Subprimal Poetry Art; Flash Fiction Magazine; and Auntie Bellum.Peter Mitchell is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Scarlet Moment (Picaro Press, 2009). Living in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW, he writes poetry, short fiction, memoir and literary criticism. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, Landscapes, Windfall: Australian Haiku, Blueppepper, and Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal, among other international and national online and print journals and anthologies. In 2014 he was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry (Varuna Writer’s Centre) and is presently writing Fragments of the Lurgi: A Mosaic, on an Artist with Disability Grant (Australia Council).Kallol Majumdar is a Bangladeshi Author.Tara Mokhtari has completed a PhD in Creative Writing/Poetry at RMIT University, teaches at Victoria University and gives workshops for new and emerging poets. Her poems have appeared in Heat 15 – Luminous Gerberas, Four W, several Visible Ink anthologies, and The New City Project. She is a regular blogger on for Overland. Tara has edited two books translated from Farsi to English for international publication and Tara worked as head of publicity for a blues and roots record label, and occasionally toured independent bands. She wrote and directed a short music documentary that aired on community television and in a few little festivals in 2004, entitled Who Is Baron Samadhi. Tara likes scotch and takes naps most days. For more of Tara’s poetry–> go to her blog.Joran C.A. Monteiro is Dutch. He lives in Melbourne. He writes poetry and fiction. Check out his Blogà Blues FictionDerek Motion works at the Booranga Writers Centre and Charles Sturt University. He writes poems, and also anything else that occurs. He has new work forthcoming in the next issues of Cordite and Overland. Go to his blog Typing Space for more thought and poetry.Lizz Murphy has published 12 books of different kinds. Her seven poetry titles include Portraits: 54 Poems and Six Hundred Dollars (PressPress), Walk the Wildly (Picaro), Stop Your Cryin (Island) and Two Lips Went Shopping (Spinifex). Her eighth poetry title,Shebirds, is forthcoming (PressPress). She is widely published in Australia and overseas. Lizz was born in Belfast, Ireland and has lived in the NSW/Canberra Region for a long time.
Lizz’s awards include: the 2011 Rosemary Dobson Poetry Prize (co-winner), the 2006 CAPO Singapore Airlines Travel Award, the 1998 ACT Creative Arts Fellowship for Literature, and the 1994 Anutech Poetry Prize. Special mentions include: Highly Commended – 2013 Blake Poetry Prize, and finalist – UK’s 2013 & 2014 Aesthetica Poetry Competitions.
You can read more of Lizz’s poetry and find out about her upcoming events on her website, Lizz Murphy: A poet’s slant, and on her blog.Alison Murray was born in 1973 in Kalgoorlie, and has lived in Perth, Brisbane, Townsville, New Guinea, Edinburgh. She has worked as barmaid, market researcher, archaeologist, anthropologist, teacher and translator. She currently lives in the south of France.Ruby J Murray is a writer, researcher, and co-founder of www.the-democracy-project.org. She placed second in the Grade Six division of the Alphington Primary School Swimming Carnival in 1996. Her first novel, Dungeons and Dragons: Hero Quest was released to parental acclaim the following year. Ruby’s work has been rejected by many well-known literary journals, including Granta and The Encyclopedia Britannica On-Line. Ruby’s blog can be found here: https://rubyjoymurray.wordpress.com/Pierz Newton-John is a web developer and writer living in Melbourne. Among other places, Pierz’s short fiction has been published in the Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, New Australian Stories and Wet Ink. You can find his blog at Cri de Coeur.Rachael Nielsen has a Bachelor of Writing from the University of Canberra and has studied literature at Oxford University and the ANU. Rachael has interned/volunteered at the M16 Artspace, the National Library and at the ANU Press. Currently she is one of the Content co-Coordinators at Scissors Paper Pen, Assistant Editor for Grapple Publishing, as well as penning nasty little predictions for Verity La as part of her work writing The Stars. When she isn’t pouring her latent bile into The Stars she is at CIT doing library studies. Rachael often writes about feminist issues but is also fixated on short stories. Her work has been published by Curio, Woroni, Lip, Vegan ACT, the ACT Writers Centre, the ANU Women’s Department and Feminartsy. You can follow her ramblings about being an emerging writer and editor on Twitter @rachaelandjane.Agnieszka Niemira is a poet, haijin, writer, and educator. Her collections of poetry, waves whisper the shoreline to life (2010) and making the invisible transparent (2008) were released through Post Pressed. Her poems have also been published in The Australian, Southerly, Blue Giraffe, Social Alternatives, poetry anthology Up From Below (Redress Press), Paper Wasp, Stylus, the Mozzie, Haiku Dreaming Australia, Scope, SpeedPoets, Empowerment4Women, Radar, Słowo Powszechne, and on BRISSC (Brisbane Rape & Incest Survivors Support Centre) website as well as on Stachuriada. She has performed her poetry at various events in Poland and Austraccccalia and read her work on radio. She won two awards, First Prize and Distinction, during a prestigious Polish Poetry Competition, Łódź’s Spring of Poets, 1985, and an Encouragement Award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Queensland) in April 1989. In 2008, she was one of the finalists of the Paper Wasp Jack Stamm Haiku Competition and a runner-up in the Brisbane Heat of Poetry Slam.Yolande Norris is a writer and producer based in Canberra. She went to the ANU School of Art and wrote on her canvases. Her lecturer said, ‘It’s not really, painting, is it?’ She’s never told anyone about her poetry before.Damen O’Brien is a Queensland poet, living in Wynnum. He is currently working as a Senior Contracts Manager for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle company, which is much less exciting than it sounds (if at all). Damen has been published in Cordite and Mascara, and has won or been highly commended in the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award, in the Ipswich Poetry Festival, The Redlands Poetry Prize, and the FAW Tasmania Poetry Prize. (www.dameno.org) Mark O’Flynn’s latest novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon,was shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and was winner of the Voss Prize. He has published four novels and a collection of short stories, White Light (2013). He lives in the Blue Mountains.Penny O’Hara is poet and short-story writer based in Canberra. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Award-winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Stories.Ryan O’Neill was born in Scotland in 1975, and has lived and worked in Rwanda, China and Lithuania. His stories have appeared in various literary magazines and journals. He lives in Newcastle, NSW with his wife and two children.Nathanael O’Reilly was born and raised in Australia. He has travelled on five continents and spent extended periods in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in nine countries, including Antipodes, Australian Love Poems, Cordite, FourW, LiNQ, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Prosopisia, Red River Review, Snorkel, Social Alternatives, Tincture, Transnational Literature and Verity La. O’Reilly is the recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. He is the author of Preparations for Departure (UWAP Poetry, 2017), Distance (Picaro Press, 2014; Ginninderra Press, 2015) and the chapbooks Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016), Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011) and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). His books are available here.Paddy O’Reilly’s work includes a short story collection, The End of the World, a novel, The Factory, and a novella, ‘Deep Water.’ Her stories have won a number of national and international story awards and been widely published, broadcast and anthologised. Her next novel will be published in the UK and Australia early in 2012.Alexandra O’Sullivan writes articles for The Radical Notion, along with writing fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Tincture and Meanjin. She recently received a Highly Commended in the inaugural Horne Prize for creative nonfiction.Stephen Oliver – Australasian poet and author of 17 volumes of poetry. Travelled extensively. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced as production voice, narrator, newsreader, radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. Lived in Australia for 20 years. Currently living in NZ. His long narrative poem, Intercolonial, published by Puriri Press, Auckland, NZ (2013). A transtasman epic. Regular contributor of creative non-fiction and poems to Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Forthcoming: Writing To The Wire Anthology, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016.Adriana Orifici is a Melbourne-based legal researcher, writer and mother. She holds honours degrees in Law and Arts, majoring in History and Creative Writing. Her legal writing has appeared in professional periodicals and journals including the Law Institute Journal while her creative writing has appeared in Overland.Geoff Page is a Canberra-based poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. Selections from his poetry have been translated into six languages. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand. He has been reviewing Australian poetry since the late 1960s, mainly in The Canberra Times and on the ABC. His most recent works are: Agnostic Skies (Five Islands Press 2006); Lawrie & Shirley:The Final Cadenza (Pandanus Books 2007); Seriatim (Salt 2007); 60 Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press 2009) as well as the CD Coffee with Miles (River Road Press 2009).Fikret Pajalic came to Melbourne as a refugee, learnt English in his mid-twenties and started writing years later. He has won and placed in competitions, and his fiction has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines Westerly, Etchings, Mascara, Regime, Verge Annual, Seizure, Tincture, Aker, Structo (UK), and JAAM (NZ).Bruce Pascoe is an award-winning Australian writer, editor and anthologist. He has published and edited Australian Short Stories Magazine1982-1999, and has won several national literary competitions such as the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult fiction (2013), The Fellowship of Australian Writers´Literature Award (1999), The Radio National Short Story Award (1980) and the FAW Short Story Competition (2011).
His latest novels are Bloke (Penguin, 2009),The Chainsaw File (Oxford, 2010), Fog a Dox(Magabala, 2012) and Mrs Whitlam (Magabala, 2016). Dark Emu, a history of Aboriginal agriculture, was published by Magabala in 2014 and won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year. His film, Black Chook, premiered in 2015 starring Brendan Cowell, Jack Davis and Lynette Curran. Bruce is a board member of the Aboriginal Corporation for Languages and lives in East Gippsland.Helena Pastor has had a number of short stories and essays published in various Australian journals including Griffith REVIEW, Westerly, Island and Hecate. ‘What’s Updog?’ is an excerpt from ‘Iron Men: Alchemy at Work, a memoir which explores the challenge of disaffected youth from a mother’s perspective. Helena has been awarded an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship and four fellowships at Varuna Writers’ House (most recently a 2010 HarperCollins Varuna Award) to develop this manuscript.Camilla Patini is a writer and student at the Australian National University. She has been published in various places such as Lip Magazine and Woroni. She has been an ACT Writers Centre Blogger in Residence and a Papercuts and Buzzcuts editor. She has also live-read for Scissors Paper Pen and rip publishing. Find out more @camillapatini.Ariel Riveros Pavez is a Sydney-based writer. His work has appeared in various publications including Journal of Postcolonial Text, Social Alternatives and Southerly. He was the convener of The Blue Space Poetry Jam readings. As well, Ariel is founding editor of the transcultural online arts magazine Australian Latino Press. To find out more and purchase Ariel’s latest poetry pamphlet, visit Ariel Riveros Pavez.Jemma Payne studies creative writing and Spanish, and is undertaking an internship with the Wollongong Writers Festival. Her short fiction and poetry has been published in Tincture Journal and Voiceworks, including in the Voiceworks #100 Special Edition, and she was shortlisted for the 2015 Visible Ink anthology. Find Jemma on Twitter @jemmalpayneGregory Piko was joint winner of the WB Yeats Poetry Prize for Australia. His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies including Page Seventeen, Short and Twisted,The Best Australian Poems, the Australian Poetry Anthology, Yeats 150 (Lilliput Press, Ire)and Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years(WW Norton, USA). Gregory lives in Yass, New South Wales.Meredith Pitt lives in Sydney. Her poetry has recently appeared in Meanjin and Bluepepper.Liesl Pfeffer is a photo-media artist from Melbourne, Australia. Originally from Brisbane, she graduated from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Photography in early 2006. Liesl makes collages from toy camera photographs, vintage fabric and found drawings. She also shoots street photography with Polaroid, Holga and Canon Demi cameras. Liesl was awarded the Queensland Centre for Photography Graduate Prize in 2005 and was a finalist in the Churchie Emerging Artist Award in 2006. She has exhibited in group shows in Brisbane and Melbourne since 2005. Her second solo show, Souvenir, will be at NO No Gallery, Melbourne, in November 2010.Louise Pine currently works as an editor and researcher in the area of industrial relations. She blogs for Overland literary journal, and she writes and edits on an ongoing voluntary basis for the Grameen Foundation. She worked as an intern with Sleepers Publishing and has had short fiction published with Cutting Teeth (UK), Viewpoint and Farrago, and non-fiction published with Neo-Industrial Opera and Beat Magazine.Justine Poon writes poetry, fiction, and law and humanities scholarship. She has been published in Going Down Swinging, the UTS Writers’ Anthology, Lip Magazine and Demos Journal. In 2017, Justine’s writing was commissioned to feature in the Greater Together exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. She is completing a PhD at the Australian National University on refugee law and critical theory.Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, Eskimo Pie, The Chimes and will appear in other magazines throughout 2016. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, Foliate Oak Magazine, the San Pedro River magazine and more than two dozens of other publications.Kerry Reed-Gilbert is a Wiradjuri woman from Central New South Wales who has performed and conducted writing workshops nationally and internationally. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) 2012 – 2015 and continues today as a Director. In 2013 she co-edited a collection of works By Close of Business, with the Us Mob Writing (UMW) group, and was FNAWN co-editor for the Ora Nui Journal, a collaboration between First Nations Australia writers and Maori writers. 2015 saw Kerry short-listed for the Story Wine Prize, and in 2016 she edited a collection of First Nations voices from across Australia titled A Pocketful of Leadership in the ACT. Kerry is a former member of the Aboriginal Studies Press Advisory Committee and her poetry and prose have been published in many journals and anthologies nationally and internationally, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Her works has been translated into French, Korean, Benglai, Dutch and other non-English speaking languages.
In 2003 Kerry was awarded an International Residence at Art Omi, New York, USA. In 1997 she toured the South African spoken word national tour ECHOES, and in 2005 she toured Aotearoa, New Zealand, as part of the Honouring Words 3rd International Indigenous Authors Celebration. In 2006 she received an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award & a Poet of Merit Award from the International Society of Poets.Lyn Reeves is a poet and indie publisher. She is an associate editor for the amazing literary journal, Famous Reporter, and the managing editor of Pardalote Press which publishes beautiful books of poetry. Last year her collection Designs on the Body won the IP Picks Best Poetry for 2010. It is published by Interactive Press.Robin Reich is a ghostly, white male who was born on Ngunnawal country in a hospital that’s been blown up. He grew up in Canberra and studied in Sydney. He has been taught by Allan Gould and Martin Harrison, and hopes to one day repay the Poet Gods for such blessings. He can be found on Twitter @TheRobinReichCaroline Reid‘s background has been largely in theatre: she’s had numerous plays produced including for Radio National and in 2010 Currency Press published my play ‘Prayer To an Iron God’. 2010 was also the year she experienced a sea-change in her writing: her focus is now on writing prose, particularly short fiction. She’s been published in indigo, fourW, Bruno’s Song (NT anthology) & Escape (Spineless Wonders anthology); she’s also been shortlisted for a number of awards and won second prize in the 2011 Boroondara Literary Awards. She curates the spoken-word event, Spineless Wonders Presents in Adelaide. Check out her blog.Sandra Renew’s poetry expresses her opinions on the state of the world. She wonders who sleeps at night? Who is lucky enough to live in safety and peace? Her poetry is informed by her many years working in war zones, in Indigenous communities and on the fringes of heterosexuality. Her poetry comments on contemporary issues and questions: war, language, environment, climate and the planet’s health, translation, dislocation, migration, terrorism, border crossings, dissent, gender, protest, human rights and freedoms.
Sandra has published several books including Projected on the Wall (Ginninderra Press, Pocket Poets series, 2015); Flood, Fire and Drought, an anthology exploring the effect of weather events on the Australian Landscape (ed. by Suzanne Edgar, Kathleen Kituai, Sandra Renew and Hazel Hall, Ginninderra Press, 2015); and One Last Border: Poems for refugees by Hazel Hall, Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew (Ginninderra Press, 2015). Who sleeps at night is forthcoming withGinninderra in December 2016.
Sandra’s tanka and tanka prose have also been published in journals internationally, and her poetry has appeared in journals such as Eureka Street, Right Now, Burley andScum. You can learn more about Sandra at her website, Guerilla Poet.Francesca Rendle-Short grew up in Queensland, the fifth of six children. She has worked variously as a radio producer, teacher, editor, freelance writer and arts journalist. She is a novelist, author of the novel/memoir Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press), Imago (Spinifex Press), and Big Sister (Redress Novellas). She is also co-author with scriptwriter Felicity Packard of the short play entitled Us. Her short fictions, photo-essays, exhibition text, and poetry for the page and for the wall, have been published in literary journals and magazines, online and in exhibitions. Francesca has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is the Program Director of Creative Writing RMIT University. She lives in Melbourne.Sarah Rice won the 2014 Ron Pretty, 2014 Bruce Dawe, and co-won the 2013 Writing Ventures and 2011 Gwen Harwood poetry prizes. Publications include: Those Who Travel (art-book of poetry, prints by Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck, 2010), Global Poetry Anthology, Award Winning Australian Writing, Best Australian Poetry, The House is Not Quiet and the World is Not Calm: Poetry from Canberra, Island, Southerly andAustralian Poetry Journal.Jade Richardson has done most of the usual things along the way to poetry, including studying Law, Literature, and Criminal Psychology, getting sick, traveling, being melancholic and occasionally being slayed by the wonder of it all.
She won the Judge’s Prize at the inaugural Ubud Poetry Slam in Bali, as well as awards for her work in short story and erotica. She is published widely as a features writer, with a particular interest in fringe dwellers and Indigenous story-keepers, and has spent long stretches of time in tents, staring at the earth. She blogs atPassionfruitcowgirl.Mark Roberts was born in Sydney and has been active in the writing community since the early 1980s. He has been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies both in Australia and overseas. He co-founded the occasional literary journal P76 in 1982 and set up Rochford Street Press in the same year. In 2011 Mark founded the online cultural review journal Rochford Street Review and he is currently poetry editor for Social Alternatives journal. Concrete Flamingos is his first major collection of poetry.Kristen Roberts is a writer and kindergarten teacher from western Melbourne. Her poetry and short stories have been published in a range of journals and anthologies including page seventeen, Australian Love Poems, Award Winning Australian Writing 2012, and Quadrant. Her first collection, The Held and The Lost, was published by Emma Press in 2014.Chloe Rose is 25. She aspires to be a photographic artist when she grows up. Intimate images come naturally to her, she wants to draw you into worlds through her lens, letting you lose yourself, if only for a moment.Josephine Rowe’s poetry and short fiction have been widely published and broadcast. Her collection of short fiction, How a Moth Becomes a Boat, was published earlier this year by Hunter Publishers, and she is currently writing a novel with assistance from the Australian Society of Authors and the Australia Council. She is the poetry editor for Harvest.

Autumn Royal is a PhD candidate in literary studies at Deakin University, Melboune, where she is writing on the verse novels of Dorothy Porter. Autumn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antipodes, Lip Magazine, Rabbit Poetry Journal, and Windmills.

Belinda Rule is a Melbourne writer of poetry and fiction. Residencies and fellowships include Varuna, Bundanon Trust and Squaw Valley Community of Writers, USA. Her work has appeared extensively in journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Westerly, Island, Cordite Poetry Review, The London Magazine and Best Australian Poems.Lee Sandwith is a Melbourne based actress, film maker and photographer with diverse experience in portraiture, event and fine art photography. She has exhibited her photographs widely and has been published in a number of publications including Platform Magazine and Dot Dot Dash Magazine. She also has a number professional film, television and theatre performance credits to her name and has directed music videos, theatre and film productions. Having the professional experience and practice of working behind and in front of the camera, Lee has a unique talent of being able to synthesize and execute all features of the photographic process to create truly impressive images. For more Lee Sandwith go to her website and flicker site.Omar Sakr is an Arab Australian poet and the poetry editor of The Lifted Brow. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Island, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite, Tincture, Mascara Literary Review, Going Down Swinging and Strange Horizons, among others. Anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2016 and Contemporary Australian Poetry, Omar also placed runner-up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. His debut collection, These Wild Houses, is out now with Cordite Books.Stephen Samuel’s first novel, Strange Eventful History, won the Varuna Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript. His short fiction has appeared in Tincture, SoftCopy and Dark Edifice.Bruce Saunders is a funky dove in a hip-swinger kind of thing called the rejuvenated part of South Africa in England where he lives with Madiba in his house called the Bat. It is not for you to see but for you to hear as he goes from one to another trying different things in order to get attention for his plight in the Mental Health Industry here where he is empowered by his desire to do the harm he can to the psychiatry that wounded his try at the politics of the day, and he would be grateful if you can read his work and see if you go to the home of the woods without seeing it all as he does. Called the Big B by some, he is the first to know it is found not in the Heart but in the Wrist Action. To read more of Bruce’s work, visit his blog, Too Lonely To Make Sense.Jillian Schedneck was born in New Jersey. After graduating from Boston College in 2002, she moved to London to work as an editorial assistant. She received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from West Virginia University in 2006, and then moved to the United Arab Emirates to teach English literature and creative writing. She lived in Abu Dhabi and Dubai for two years, where she worked at Abu Dhabi University and the American University in Dubai. Jillian moved to Adelaide, Australia in 2010 to pursue a PhD in Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research focuses on Emirati women’s creative expressions of national identity. Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights is her first book. Jillian’s work has been published in American and Australian literary journals, such as Brevity, The Common Review, Fourth River, Wet Ink, Quadrant, LinQ and Alligator Juniper. Jillian is the reader for Verity La, and editor for the journal’s TWT (Travel, Write, Travel) stream.Pam Schindler is a Brisbane poet, and drew on memories of Moreton Island in writing this poem. She is the author of one book of poems, A sky you could fall into (2010), and her work has been published in Australian journals including Meanjin, Hecate, Island, and Australian Poetry Journal. She went to write in a Scottish castle as a Hawthornden Fellow in 2013.Nicola Scholes is the author of Dear Rose, a poetry chapbook published by Small Change Press in 2009 (www.smallchangepress.com.au). Nicola’s poems have appeared in the journals The Broadkill Review (USA), Cordite, Hecate, Page Seventeen, Social Alternatives, Stylus, and the books Hibiscus and Ti-Tree: Women in Queensland, and Poems in Perspex: Max Harris Poetry Award 2007. Nicola regularly performs her poems at the Brisbane spoken word event SpeedPoets, and at Queensland Poetry Festival in 2008 and 2009.Ronnie Scott’s writing has appeared in HEAT, Torpedo, Wet Ink, Bookslut, The Rumpus, The Big Issue, and other magazines. He’s the program advisor for the National Young Writers’ Festival, and he’s taught writing, editing, and publishing at a couple of Australian universities.Hayley Scrivenor is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. You can find her work in Seizure Online, SCUM, Phantasmagoria, SWAMP and prowlings, among other places. She is a passionate member of the Wollongong Writers Festival team and spends much of the rest of her time learning, forgetting and re-learning how to tie a bowline.Michele Seminara is a poet, editor, and yoga teacher from Sydney whose work has been published widely in journals online and in print. Her first poetry collection, Engraft, was published by Island Press in 2016. She is Verity La‘s managing editor. Her poem ‘Grand Mont’ was selected for publication in Verity La before she became a volunteer with the journal. Michele blogs at https://micheleseminara.wordpress.com/ and is on twitter @SeminaraMichele.J.L. Shenstone is a writer of short fiction and poetry. She has been published in Banquet 2011: An anthology of new writing and art by Australian Queer Women. When not writing, Jas can usually be found basking in the whiskey spring. Here website is at www.jlshenstone.comJohn Smith was born in Sydney but has lived on the north coast of NSW for thirty-five years. He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Sydney. Smith has held more than thirty solo exhibitions and is primarily represented by Watters Gallery, in Sydney. He has work in many public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Artbank and many regional collections. The tension in his work oscillates between making and effacing, simultaneously. This is the irony of ‘quietly bursting balloons’, ‘scribbling rivalry’, ‘as easy as pulling teeth’, ‘the look of something to say’, ‘and ‘smear campaign’, being the various titles he uses. In recent years he has led a cultural heritage retrieval project interfaced with creative arts, Fisherman’s Village. This project has resulted in a number of conference papers, journal publications and a book chapter. John Smith is the Senior Lecturer in Painting and is the Course Coordinator and Honours Coordinator in Visual Arts at Southern Cross University.Lucas Smith is a poet and writer from California and Gippsland, currently living in Melbourne. His work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Australian Book Review, Gargouille, Cordite and elsewhere. One of his stories was highly commended in the 2012 Age Short Story Award.Melinda Smith won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for her fourth poetry collection, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (Pitt St Poetry). She lives in Canberra but enjoys being let out sometimes. This year she has appeared at the Sydney and Newcastle Writer’s Festivals, and at the Queensland Poetry Festival. She blogs at www.melindasmith.wordpress.com and tweets as @MelindaLSmith.Gaele Sobott has published a range of acclaimed works including, Colour Me Blueand My Longest Round, co-authored with Wally Carr, the second edition forthcoming with Magabala Books. She identifies as a disabled artist and was selected for the first cohort of the Australia Council for the Arts 2014 Sync Leadership Program. In 2015 she was artist in residence at Google Australia. Gaele is the founding director of Outlandish Arts. She produced NoRMAL, a performance of stories by four artists on their experiences of disability, the Australian tour of Caroline Bowditch’s, Falling in Love with Frida, the Australia-UK creative development of Deaf Australian playwright Sofya Gollan’s play, MotherLode, in London, and Fools’ Gold, a series of poetry performances, workshops and critical discussion events involving artists who experience psychological and emotional distress. Gaele was commissioned to write ZaphoraandAli for Urban Theatre Projects’ Home Country staged by Sydney Festival 2017. She participated in the DADAA and Perth International Arts Festival Aesthetics of Access residency in March 2017 with Jenny Sealey MBE, Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre Company UK. She was also selected to take part in the two-week Jo Bannon Penetration and Performance residency in Adelaide in August 2017. Gaele facilitated the Access2Arts Embody project for disabled writers and is currently leading the Writing Me project. She has just completed a collection of short stories about life in an apartment building in Lakemba, Sydney, where she resides.Alicia Sometimes is a poet, writer, broadcaster and musician. She has been published in Australia and overseas in such publications as Best Australian Poems 2006 and 2009, Cordite, Verandah, Westerly, Heat, Southerly, Poetrix, Short Fuse, Hecate, papertiger, Blue Dog, Overland, Meanjin etc. She has performed spoken word over 400 times as a feature or guest at many venues, festivals and events in Australia, Berlin, London and New Zealand, including the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Mildura Arts Festival, Tasmanian Poetry Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival, The Big Day Out and the Newcastle Writers’ Festival also appearing on the SBS TV program Nomad and ABC TV shows Recovery and Sunday Arts. Her work has appeared on many spoken word CDs, including Going Down Swinging, You Talkin To Me?, Short Fuse (US) and Synaptic Graffiti. She has two collections of poetry, kissing the curve and Soundtrack. She is currently a presenter on 3RRR with a weekly show Aural Text dedicated to playing spoken word and in 2002 was a monthly guest on JJJ’s Artery showcasing the best in spoken word from around Australia. In 2004 she was co-organiser of the first national poetry radio slam on Radio National. She was co-editor of the literary journal Going Down Swinging for seven years.Anna Spargo-Ryan is the Melbourne-based author of The Paper House. Her short fiction has been published in Kill Your Darlings, and she also writes on parenting and mental health for the Guardian, Overland and Daily Life, among other publications.Beth Spencer is the author of Vagabondage (UWAP), The Party of Life (Flying Islands), How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House) and Things in a Glass Box (FIP). A selection of her ABC-Radio National sound and text pieces – including a feature on Poetica – were collected on the double CD, Body of Words (dogmedia). Her awards include the Age Short Story Award, runner up for the Steele Rudd, the inaugural Dinny O’Hearn Fellowship, a Varuna Writers Fellowship, and several Literature Board fellowships from the Australia Council. She also has a PhD on ‘The Body as Fiction/Fiction as a Way of Thinking’ and a website at www.bethspencer.com.Warwick Sprawson’s stories have appeared in magazines including Southerly, Wet Ink and Etchings. He also writes non-fiction, which pays better, particularly hiking stories. He was runner-up in the 2009 Rolf Boldrewood Awards, and, more recently, was awarded £10 for coming second in a beauty competition.Phillip Stamatellis has only recently learnt how to iron his own shirts, is a part-time house husband, and often ruminates on the mystery of why fitted sheets don’t fit. He is studying writing at the University of Canberra and one day hopes the written word will free him from the shackles of domestic servitude.Johanna Stapleton is an emerging Melbourne writer currently studying creative writing and literary studies at Deakin University.David Stavanger is a poet, writer, and cultural producer who has been an active part of the Brisbane poetry community for the past ten years. In 2013 he won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Award, resulting in the release of The Special (UQP), his first full-length collection of poetry, and at the 2014 Queensland Literary Awards he was awarded a Queensland Writing Fellowship to develop his next two collections. David was recently appointed as the Co-Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. He is also sometimes known as Green Room-nominated spoken word artist Ghostboy, established the thriving Queensland poetry slam scene via his program work with the State Library of Queensland and Woodford Folk Festival. You can order The Specialhere. Find him at www.davidstavanger.com and on FaceBookBekah Steimel lives in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) and is working on a first collection of poetry, chronicling one lesbian’s struggles with addiction, fidelity, mental illness, and mortality. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diverse Arts Project, Full of Crow, Gutter Eloquence, Milk Sugar, Mused, RiverLit, and Sinister Wisdom. Visit www.bekahsteimel.com.Sarah St Vincent Welch lives in Canberra and facilitates creative writing and creative reading, as well as doing some of her own. She co-edited The Pearly Griffin – the story of the old Griffin Centre with Lizz Murphy, and two short story anthologies – The Circulatory System and Time Pieces with Craig Cormick. She also co-edited FIRST: Surrender with Francesca Rendle-Short in 2007 (a student anthology at the University of Canberra) and is editor of FIRST in 2012 (working with a student committee). Her short fiction (or long poetry – whichever way the coin lands), has been anthologised, and also published in independent magazines. She blogs at https://thisfiveminutes.comJohn Stokes is an Australian poet, author, essayist and performer who has published widely in Australia, Europe, U.K., U.S.A and Japan. He has won or been shortlisted for many prizes including the Blake, Newcastle, Rosemary Dobson and WoorillaPrizes for Poetry. He has represented Australia at festivals and his publication credits include A River in theDark (Five Islands Press); Dancing in the Yard at Eden (Orta San Giulio); Fire in the Afternoon (Halstead Press) and numerous journals and anthologies. Website: www.johnkarlstokes.comShane Strange is a writer living in Canberra, Australia. His short fiction has appeared in various publications, including Griffith Review, Heat, Verandah and Overland, as well as being collected in Best Australian Stories 2006 and 2007.Rebecca Stringer is an academic and erstwhile photographer and lives on the Otago Penninsula in Dunedin, New Zealand, with her partner and son. Rebecca lectures in Gender Studies at the University of Otago and is the author of Knowing Victims: Feminism, Agency and Victim Politics in Neoliberal Times (London: Routledge, 2014), and co-editor ofFeminism At the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2011).Amidst all this, photography provides a practice of everyday magic and fascination with light and form.Nike Sulway is the author of a handful of novels, short stories, and a few poems. She has received a number of literary awards, including the James Tiptree, Jr Award, which is for a work of speculative fiction that explores and expands our understanding of gender. She lives and works in Queensland.Louise Swinn is the editorial director of independent publisher, Sleepers, publishers of The Sleepers Almanac. She is also a reviewer and fiction writer, whose work has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Overland, Best Australian Stories and The Australian. She tweets at @Louise_SwinnMaria Takolander’s first collection of poems, Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. Her poetry has been widely published, appearing in The Best Australian Poems (Black Inc) and/or The Best Australian Poetry (UQP) every year since 2005. She was also winner of the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Competition in 2010. She is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong.Michael Talbot lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. A news writer and editor by profession, he’s been an avid street photographer for years, wandering the streets of Toronto with a variety of cameras, always on the lookout for an intriguing character or candid street scene. He posts his work on www.urbanghost.com.Julie Thorndyke is a graduate of the Master of Creative Writing programme at the University of Sydney. She has published tanka in many journals, both locally and overseas. A winner in the Tanka Splendor competition in 2006, 2007 2008 and 2009, she was also awarded an honourable mention in 6th International Tanka Festival Competition 2009 (Japan). Her first collection of tanka, rick rack, was published by Ginninderra Press in 2008. Her second collection, Carving Granite, is due out in 2011.Vicki Thornton is an emerging poet and lives in the Dandenong Ranges. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Divan, Page Seventeen, Tamba, Poetrix, Polestar and a poem has been accepted for the APC Dear Dad anthology. She is the Acting Editor of Page Seventeen and is now dipping her toe into performance poetry.Jim Tsinganos was born in Peterborough, South Australia in 1964. He received a Bachelor of Design specialising in illustration from the Underdale campus of the South Australian College of Arts and Education (now UNISA). He has participated in countless exhibitions — both group and solo shows — nationally and internationally and has been commissioned and collected by private collectors from around the world and by Opera Australia.
Throughout his career Jim has been featured and accepted into most of the international juried illustration awards shows across the globe, and has been repeatedly selected as one of the worlds top 200 illustrators worldwide by Lurzer’s Archive Magazine.
Originally working in pastels for the early part of his career, Jim transitioned into the digital medium several years ago and now works almost exclusively in Photoshop. He is interested in producing work with a strong conceptual basis and is committed to always pushing and developing a visual idea.
Predominantly editorial in nature, his work has been commissioned for assignments as varied as designs on an underwear range, packaging for a power super-foods company, and producing a series of stamps for Australia Post. Most recently, he was commissioned by the Australian Mint, which released a limited edition commemorative collectors coin for Australia Day featuring his image.
You can view more of Jim’s work and purchase prints of his images at Jim Tsinganos Iluustration.

Todd Turner’s poems have appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, Quadrant, Islet, Australian Poetry Journal, The Weekend Australian, Cordite and Overland. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Jean Cecily Drake Brockman Poetry Prize. He was highly commended in the 2011 Blake Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Newcastle Poetry Prize. His first collection of poems is set to be published in the next year.

Saba Vasefi is a poet, academic, filmmaker and the director of Sydney International Women’s Poetry & Arts Festival. She is an Asylum Seekers Centre Ambassador, was the recipient of an Edna Ryan Award for making a significant contribution to feminism, and was twice a judge for the Sedigheh Dolatabadi Book Prize for the Best Book on Women’s Literature and Women’s Issues. Saba’s master’s thesis in Feminist Literary Criticism received the highest grade possible and at the age of twenty-four she became a lecturer at the prestigious Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. She was expelled from the university after four years of teaching due to her activism against capital punishment, and moved to Australia in 2010. She holds a postgraduate degree in Documentary at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), and is currently working on a thesis on Human Rights and Feminism in the Cinema of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Robert Verdon belonged to Aberrant Genotype Press in Canberra from 1998-2002. He came 2nd in the 2012 W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize, and was Highly Commended in the 2012 erbacce Prize, UK. His books include The Well-Scrubbed Desert (1994), Her Brilliant Career (1998), & Before we Knew this Century (2010). He is currently embroiled in a PhD and will present a paper (‘The Optics of Composition’) at the 18th annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference ‘Creative Manoeuvres’, University of Canberra, in November 2013.Deb Wain is a poet and short story writer who is passionate about the Australian environment. She has generally been employed in jobs where she talks for a living. When not writing or talking you can find Deb dancing in the garden, drinking coffee, or continuing her studies in creative writing. (Deb is a current PhD candidate at Deakin University.)rob walker has always been fascinated by language and its multiplicity of forms. In between his time as an educator in Performing Arts around Adelaide and teaching English to Junior and Senior High students and adults in Japan, rob has also found time to write a children’s musical, essays, short stories, poetry reviews, co-edit a poetry anthology and produce three poetry books. With hundreds of poems being published online and in journals and anthologies in the UK, US (including The Cortland Review, Illya’s Honey and Red River Review) and Australia (including Best Australian Poems, Australian Poetry, foam:e, Quadrant, Rabbit Journal, Divan, Mascara, 21D and Unusual Work), rob also enjoys collaborating with other artists (eg Max-Mo, Zephyr Quartet and ccmixter.org). He currently divides his time between grandchildren, a small farm in the Adelaide Hills, travelling and writing. His next poetry collection Tropeland will be launched by Five Islands Press in June 2015.Anne Walsh is a poet and a story writer whose work falls somewhere on the border of those two countries. But most of the time she has no country at all. She’s a local nowhere. She was shortlisted for the ACU Prize in Literature and The Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014. Her work has been published in the U.S. and in Australia.James Walton lives in the Strzelecki Mountains in South Gippsland. His work has appeared in Eureka Street, Plumwood Mountain, Hubgarden Poetry, Australian Love Poems, The Wonder Book of Poetry, Bluepepper, Australian Poetry, A Sudden Presence – Poetry from the ACU Literature Prize, Poetry d’Amour, Australian Poetry collaboration, Great Ocean Quarterly, Bukowski On Wry, Writing Raw, Five2One magazine, The Medical Journal of Australia, Australian Latino Press, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspaper. He was shortlisted for the ACU National Literature Prize in 2013 and in 2015, and received a special commendation in The Welsh Poetry Competition 2014. His collection The Leviathan’s Apprentice is now available.Tony Walton is a Caribbean writer living in the Cayman Islands and his works have appeared in Storyteller Magazine, Moonkind Press, Whisperings Magazine, Mountain Tales Press, Out of Our Magazine, Poetry Bay Magazine, Burningword Magazine, Wilde Magazine, Nite Writers Literary International Literary Journal, Avalon Literary Review, Iceland Daily, East Lit Literary Magazine, Boston Poetry Magazine, Eunoia Magazine, and Olentangy Review.Visit him at https://tonywalton.blogspot.com/Gemma White: Having cycled through a few different art forms in her life so far (visual art, writing and now music), Gemma is fascinated by the creative process. It has saved her in dark times, and salved the inevitable existential loneliness that comes with being human. Gemma has studied Creative Writing, Art History, and Visual Art, as well as Counselling and Art Therapy. From 2008 – 2015 she published a few poetry journal anthologies; Velveteen Zine,Velour and Sacred / Profane. Her own first book of poetry, Furniture is Disappearing, was published in 2014 by IP. It is available to buy here:https://www.ipoz.biz/Titles/FID.htm. She is currently working on a new manuscript of poems. Gemma enjoys helping other artists to birth their creative projects and is now available as a writing mentor. You can find her online here:www.gemmaannwhite.com & https://www.facebook.com/GemmaAnnWhiteART/.Les Wicks has seen publication across 19 countries in 10 languages. His 11th book of poetry is Sea of Heartbeak(Unexpected Resilience) (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). This year he will be performing in Delhi World Poetry Festival, LA – Beyond Baroque, Austin International Poetry Festival, Brett Whiteley Studio and RhiZomic. He can be found at https://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htmLara S. Williams is a British/Australian writer whose work has been published in Cordite, Antipodes, Islet, Blue Crow, page seventeen, Island, Mascara, fourW and the Sun Herald Extras Section. She is editor of the travel journal The Great Affairs and is currently undertaking her creative writing masters at the University of Edinburgh.Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 290 national and international online and print journals. He is a Christian,a self-taught pianist, singer, and painter. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net anthology (https://www.sundresspublications.com/). The poems which were nominated for the Best of the Net anthology are as follows: ‘The Jazz of Old Wine’, ‘The Symbol of Abiotic Needs’, & ‘The Misfortune of Shallow Sight’. He holds the B.A. and the M.A. in English/Creative Writing/Literature from the University of Memphis. Ernest,an English Professor, at Essex County College, has taught English at New Jersey City University and tutored students in English and Mathematics at Seton Hall University. Professor Williamson, who is (ABD), is also finishing up his Ph.D. at Seton Hall University in the field of Higher Education Leadership. He is also a member of The International High IQ Society https://www.highiqsociety.org/my-account/pdf_certificate.php based in New York City and he is a Chess Master’ with an internet rating in the range of 2200+. Currently he is rated 2212.SB Wright was born in the town of Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land, though most of his life has been spent in Alice Springs. A graduate of NTU he has spent his adult working life as a security guard, a martial arts instructor, a trainer in an international gaming company and currently works as a primary school teacher. His work has been published in Tincture Journal, INDaily Adelaide, Eureka Street, Bluepepper, WritPoetry Review and the anthologies The Stars Like Sand and Poetry & Place 2015.Chris Womersley is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction, reviews and essays. His work has appeared in Granta, Best Australian Stories 2006 and 2010, The Griffith Review, The Monthly and The Age. In 2007 one of his short stories won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature. He won the 2008 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction for his novel The Low Road. His second novel Bereft was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Australian Society of Literature Gold Medal and won the Indie Award for Best Fiction. www.chriswomersley.comBel Woods is a fiction writer with a penchant for short stories. Her work has appeared in [untitled] magazine #2 and was Commended in the Alan Marshall Short Story Award. She is currently studying at La Trobe University.SB Wright was born in the town of Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land, though most of his life has been spent in Alice Springs. A graduate of NTU he has spent his adult working life as a security guard, a martial arts instructor, a trainer in an international gaming company and currently works as a primary school teacher. His work has been published in Tincture Journal, INDaily Adelaide, Eureka Street, Bluepepper, WritPoetry Review and the anthologies The Stars Like Sand and Poetry & Place 2015.Brian Young is a homeless Central Australian man living in Darwin’s ‘long grass’. He is a talented performance poet too often over-looked and not heard. Amidst life’s troubles he flourishes and survives still.Daniel Youngis a reader, writer, editor, and software developer living in Brisbane. He has had short stories and flash fiction published in Hello Mr. Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Bukker Tillibul, Seizure, Cuttings Journal, Verity La, Bide Magazine, The Suburban Review, and antiTHESIS journal. He is the founder and editor of Tincture Journal and is reviewing all the novellas at allthenovellas.com. You can find him on Twitter @jazir1979.Denise Young was born in Sydney, Australia, though she spent some eighteen years living in London, Wellington, Adelaide and Perth. In 1986 she came back home to Sydney for good. Her background is in both academia and theatre, where she’s worked as a teacher, actress and director. She began writing plays in the mid-eighties, as well as creating theatre pieces with actors’ companies and directing a youth theatre team. In 2000 she turned to writing prose and her first novel, The Last Ride, was published by HarperCollins in 2004, after winning a Varuna/HarperCollins Award in 2002. The novel’s development was also assisted by two mentorships through Varuna, one with Tegan Bennett Daylight and a later one with Charlotte Wood. The novel won the NSW Premier’s Prize for a First Novel in 2005, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in the same year and was shortlisted for the SA Festival Awards in 2006. A film of the book, with film script by Mac Gudgeon and starring Hugo Weaving, was released in 2009. Denise has taught writing workshops and at community colleges, and lives south of Sydney with her husband Paul, with whom she has three grown up children.Sam van Zweden (23) lives in Melbourne and studies Creative Writing at RMIT. She is a poet, short-story writer, reviewer and blogger (https://www.littlegirlwithabigpen.wordpress.com). Her work has appeared in Ricochet Magazine (https://ricochetmag.wordpress.com/ezine/), Page Seventeen, Voiceworks and Catalyst, and she was a 2010 Australian Poetry Slam state finalist.